windows wont start - plzzz help

[cole88]

hi all... came home, turned my laptop on and this page came up

Pheonix First BIOS notebook Pro version 2.0
copyright bla bla
all rights reserved

cpu = inter (r) pentium (r) m processor 1.50ghz
63k9 system rams passed... u get the point....

then it jumps to a page saying "we apologise for the inconvienance, but windows did not start successfully" bla bla

then it gives me the options to start windows on the last known good configuration or to start normally... i have tried both these options and it continually goes back to the first page and does the same thing over and over (there is a 30 second counter to start windows normally) i have restarted it, pressed f8 and rebooted it, just left it with the 30 second counter and its doing the same thing over and over.

any ideas... ??

[gerbil]

Yep. This is where you get to do a windows Repair..... grab your installation cd, change your one-time boot to cdrom [F11 at boot?] and go past Recovery Console to Repair section in Setup. You won't lose your data, but your apps will possibly need reinstallation.

[cole88]

ok i put the installation disc in (nec windows xp pro installation cd) and it took me to the "welcome to the nec recovery program" page and in a grey box it says:

attention
please take note that this utilitiy is meant for system recovery only. press ok if you want to continue, cancel and return to dos

but my cursor isnt showing up on the screen and nothing happens when i press enter... im stuck on this page...

any further insight...

[gerbil]

That NEC recovery cd will probably be of the type that erases your HD and reinstalls windows plus any other bundled applications, leaving you with an as-new computer... you would lose your data. I'm thinking HD failure here because it would not run. You could burn a bootable cd that allows you to copy off any data files you can salvage. But first I would try to check the HD with windows recovery console by running chkdsk /p. Recovery Console is a mini version of Windows Setup.This iso is one I have used [am plugging in some text I wrote for someone else on this subject]:
Because you may not be in possession of an Xp install CD, here's a boot disc with a recovery console on it; the console runs from the cd so you don't need an xp cd or any files from your C drive. I know it works. All you need is an image burner like Nero 6, CD Writer...
Tips... unzip the file to get the iso and then BURN THE IMAGE. Do not use Data CD or any other mode cos all you will get is a copy of the iso [which you have already...and your new CD will not be bootable]; if you look at the files on your new cd and see .iso mentioned anywhere, start over. If you use Nero 6 then the defaults for image burning are fine, skip the silly advice that you may find on the web. You merely select Burn an Image, browse to and select the .iso and press Burn. That is all it takes. Burn it to a CD-RW if you wish; there is no need to close/finalise the CD whether it is a RW or R. Multisession works fine. If you use a CD-RW then hold the burn speed lowish, say 4x.

http://www.webtree.ca/windowsxp/Tools/bootdiscs/xp_rec_con.zip

Run chkdsk to perform a simple check of the drive. If there are any errors reported you must then do chkdsk /p to attempt to recover them, and follow with chkdsk to see if it is fixed. If not, try /p again, and so on.
{ chkdsk with no parameter will not fix a thing. .... }. You can just run chkdsk /p immediately if you wish.
There is a quite restricted copy command available too.