What would the underlying issue be?

[kdlong]

My pc shut down out of the blue. Am getting the proverbial "Windows did not start successfully" message upon attempting to start it. You know....black screen with white text, giving you several options on starting back up.

Regardless of any option I choose, it shuts back down after chossing that option.

Any takers?

Appreciate it!

[|-|x]

This is really pretty vague, is there any more information you can post?

• What version of Windows are you running?
• Has there been any changes (hardware, software or configuration) to your pc recently?
• did you notice anything strange just prior to this occurrance - running slow, error messages, something not working etc.?
• do you have a recovery disk / backup that you could restore the system from?

If no warning signs were noticed it could be a corrupted hard disk sector or bootloader. You could try running a disk repair/maintenance program like Spinrite and see if it fixes the problem. (Of course it could also be some other issue, just a suggestion to try.)

[gerbil]

Lessee... just so that you get the correct screen of options, restart your sys and begin pressing F8 as BIOS runs, and you should lob into a black screen Advanced Options Boot Menu with one of them being "Disable automatic restart on system failure". Choose that one. Restart your system. This time it should halt with a blue screen. Please post the two lines at Technical Information [with the Stop Code], and the fault line near the top of the screen.
It may be that you just need to run:
chkdsk /r
from a recovery console to fix your hdd. You can access the RC from your installation disk, or find a downloadable iso. Here is a selection:
http://www.thecomputerparamedic.com/files/rc.iso
http://www.webtree.ca/windowsxp/tools/bootdiscs/xp_rec_con.zip

[Webville312]

Perhaps you could start with providing us with the information that Hearth requested. At least from that view point; we can be able to help you.