Another Windows XP Question

Windows XP Pro hangs on Welcome Screen

A friend brought his computer over and said it will not boot. He said that SpySweeper came up with some msg and shut the computer down. When he brought the computer back up it just stuck at the welcome screen with no user icons to click...

Safe mode and all other startups are the same, they get to the welcome screen and appear to just hang there. Ctrl+Alt+Del does nothing and there are no user log in icons.

I ran a chkdsk /R from the recovery console and got nothing...

Im wondering if my only real option at this point is to do an install on top of the current windows installation. I don't think formatting is an option as there is about half of the content on the drive that is not backed up right now.

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Comments

eurotrash

tried LKGC?

Megadeth4168

I guess I should not have left that out... but Yes that is one of the first things I tried.

Sie

Attempted FIXMBR command from the Windows XP Recovery Console?

Either that or LKGC.

Or run XP Setup using boot disk (or CD if bootable device) and 'R' for repair.

Megadeth4168

Sie wrote:

Attempted FIXMBR command from the Windows XP Recovery Console?

Either that or LKGC.

Or run XP Setup using boot disk (or CD if bootable device) and 'R' for repair.

I've done a fixboot but not a fixmbr. I have done LKGC.

Unfortunately the option to do a repair install is not present... This may be because it is an upgrade CD that my friend has.

Non-Profit Techie

There are ways to fix the registry using some of the keys made from system restore directories. It is a bit involved so you might want to search on the net for how to do it. I have done it many times and had luck getting back into windows and most of the time the system runs fine after that.

Non-Profit Techie

doing this might fix it

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=307545

Megadeth4168

Thanks for the link. I will let you know later if it works or not... I won't get a chance to look at it again until I get home from work.

Failing that, I should be OK with installing the OS over the old installation correct?

Non-Profit Techie

you wont fail

just remember, the objective is to replace the old system32\config directory files with the ones in the snapshot directory. basically you are doing a LKGC but of a much earlier date.

It looks like in the second step of the directions it says you cant access the restore dirctories from the console but i swear that is what i had done in the past. anyway, it might work using the ones in the repair directory as instructed in step one.

woodworm

I did this yesterday (reinstalled the OS over the previous installation) and it worked well (different problem to yours though, my laptop blue screened when it tried to run winlogon.exe).

It's not something I would normally do as I would prefer a clean install, but the user wanted to get their data back, etc.

You could move the harddisk to another PC (as a slave) and copy off the data that you want to keep then do a complete clean reinstall.

Megadeth4168

Great! Thanks for all the helpful hints and advice!

Non-Profit Techie

see edit i made to prior post

Megadeth4168

Non-Profit Techie wrote:

see edit i made to prior post

Noted...

I do remember doing this probably about a year ago with a different issue on another job. Worked great then so I hope it will work great tonight. Once again thanks for the help.