I'm having a biiig problem with Windows XP crashing at startup. It happened after my dad was working on replacing the inverter on my laptop since the screen has given me no end of troubles. The computer displays the Windows XP splash screen (the one with the little animated progress bar thingy) and then automatically restarts -- lather, rinse, repeat. There are no error messages displayed.

We were able to boot it using a Knoppix CD and fortunately the files are undamaged. Is there any way to repair XP with the installation disc? (By the way, I have a Toshiba laptop that came with Windows XP installed on it, so it really doesn't have an installation disc per se, but rather one that includes all of the stuff contained on the system from the beginning.)

When you boot your computer, press F8 to go to advanced options. Select Disable automatically restart from there. The computer will restart, see if it gives you the blue screen of death. Tell us the error code.

had some similiar issues that drove me crazy for a couple days.

Windows XP started to freeze at boot when loading drivers. Was able to get to the HD with acroplis and make a backup. Thought an XP file was corrupt, so went to repair mode and fixboot, but this didn't work. Disabled most services. Re-seated all cards/memory. This did not work. Used memtest86 to check memory. No errors. Used Seagate to check HD for errors. No Errors. Checked Power, Temp etc... All tests came back OK. Thought maybe XP was just corrupt with a virus or something. Freeze again during install when XP rebooted. Thought maybe the DELL version of XP was checking the HD for info during install, serial numbers or such. Nope. Updated mobo BIOS. Still freezes. Could boot off floppy, DVD, HD (Win98) to DOS. Could read HD fine. What is going on here? Could it be the video card? Nvidia Gforce... Tested OK. Removed battery to reset CMOS. Still freezes. Check cables and hardware settings in BIOS. Everything looks ok. Went through many posts on several sites. People are replacing mobos, memory, hds, power supplies. Finally, after several days of troubleshooting, I see a couple posts with similiar issues. One guy replaced drive cables, and this worked for him. One guy disable DVD drive and that worked for him. I do have 2 DVD/CDROM drives. One CD-RW and one DVD-RW. The DVD-RW is the drive I always use now and it had been working fine. But the other was BAD! I disconnected that CD-RW and BAM!, Windows XP starts right up. Not sure if it was because the drive was secondary master or just gone. So check these things before buying all new hardware. You may be able to save some money/time.

Not sure if this thread is still running.

I have a custom XP machine which starts to load the XP splash page and then restarts. I've used the advice above to disable the restart, and get the error below on the blue screen of death.

STOP: 0x0000007B (0xF789E524, 0xC0000034, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)

Any advice would be very welcome.

Cheers,

Stuart

Your hard disk is dead or corrupted. Alternatively, it could be a bad disk driver or a bootsector virus

if its corrupted or a bad driver, you will need to reinstall windows XP (a repair install will do probably)

a bootsector virus can be removed using the recovery console.

Either way, you will need your XP cd

Thanks for the quick response. This a work machine that I have to get up and running by morning and have been here most of the afternoon.

I've run chkdsk /r in the Recovery Console. It found a problem and fixed it but still keeps re-starting. I then ran fixmbr and still nothing.

We have Corporate Norton running on our entire network so think it's probably a bad drive rather than a virus.

If I run a repair install of XP off the CD, will it clear the C drive or just overwrite the XP installation? The machine is used for multimedia work and I have quite a few programs on there I'd rather not lose or have to re-install.

Cheers,

Stuart

It usually breaks all your programs but a repair install (should) keep your documents

Hey, I'm having the same problems as the OP. When i disabled automatic restart, the BSOD gave the following errors:
Any ideas? I'm kind of a newb to this kind of thing so if I said or did something wrong thats why.

I'm amazed this post is still up.

In the end, I just bought a different computer (a Toshiba again, this time with Vista instead, not by choice). I'm taking a lot better care of this laptop so hopefully I won't have a similar problem again. My next computer will most likely be a desktop, though, because I no longer take my laptop anywhere and everywhere (or have any reason to). Plus they last a lot longer and are easier to repair.

By the way, I don't recommend buying Toshiba laptops; they have some decent performance/price deals, but their customer service blows.

mistne says
stop 0x000000ed (ox81b1ce30,0xc0000006,0x00000000,0x00000000)