Back up... finally!

[Chicken]

So the other day I go to use the computer and it's acting funny. I hate that. Everything seems to be slow. All web pages loading slowly, almost like when the anti-virus program is scanning the entire computer, or I've suddenly switched over to 56K dialup. I hate that. I figure, it's been a bit since a reboot, so that will flush things and all will be well.

Reboot... and... won't come up. Hangs at various points, but won't come up. Safe mode doesn't help much, as it stops working after loading

\sys32\drivers\agp440.sys

So I look on the net...

MS suggests the Recovery Console and to disable agp440...
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;324764

Found other people with similar problem...
http://www.computing.net/windows2000/wwwboard/forum/21602.html

-hard to know if anything was the same, and it seems there's more than one fix. People upgraded/installed the latest motherboard BIOS drivers, changed the settings in the BIOS, deleted every agp440 key in the registry, motherboard problem, the power supply, removed the DVD/CDRW combo drive, IRQ conflict, reinstalled the OS, etc. Quite a variety of fixes there.

So, I try some of the things there. Nothing works, still hangs, sometimes reporting one thing, sometimes another. I chkdsk'd the drives, said it fixed errors. Later it said ntoskrnl.exe was focker'd, and to replace it (nice directions there). Add to that, I couldn't find *one* damn XP disc to pull files from to try to replace some of the files it said were missing/corrupt.

Finally, after checking the ram, the video card, etc., I removed one of the hard drives that seemed to have an error (one of the many error messages), though nothing fatal. Seems it was fatal, as when I unplugged it the thing booted up fine, though I haven't rebooted since, heh.

After a day and half... I'm back.

:band:

:: knows he needs help ::

:dchick:

[nameslave]

So you are now off 1 of your multiple hard drives, right? I'm not a hardware expert (not really an expert of anything indeed), but if it is only a hard drive, you could always back it up or copy the data onto another disk (bit by bit to make sure you don't copy the error as well). And if you can't even start up with safe mode, now that you are in, you may want to disable your normal start up procedure and choose to do so selectively (by running e.g. msconfig). My guess is that it's time to get a new computer. (I am actually talking to myself, heh. :D)

[markblair]

It's good that you are back up. I had a similar problem after upgrading my PC recently. It wouldn't bootup into Windows and when going into Safe Mode one specific file (mup.sys) was the culprit. Everywhere I checked, the fix was different. For me, the fix was to replace the ribbon cable running to the hard drives but other fixes ranged from updating something to replacing hardware. It's quite annoying when you try to do something good for your computer (including just rebooting) and it stops working the way it should. Frustrating indeed! ;)

[Chicken]

Luckily, it was the second hard drive (which I believe I used as just a backup). You can probably tell I didn't back things up enough as I'm not entirely sure what was on that drive. I disconnected it and from what I can tell, everything is still here (I have one 160GB drive that has two partitions which is just confusing really, plus the 80GB drive which is the one that apparently took a digger).

I'll probably rip it out and put it in an external case to see what is on it and if it can be fixed. I find it odd that a secondary drive would have prevented the computer from booting, and caused it to act that way. Everything is on the other drive, not this one.

I'm about to reboot so you might not see me for a couple more days...

:: crosses fingers ::

[MMiz]

I had the EXACT same problem yesterday and googled forever.

What fixed mine was doing the following:

Boot into recovery mode with the CD
chkdsk /R I believe, it's the one that does the full scan and fixes the items
fixboot c:

And that did it for me, though I had to do it two times.

Truthfully I'm guessing it was faulty hardware, but it was on a borrowed laptop, so I fixed it and returned it :baghead: