XP freezes before welcome screen

Hi there i could really use some advice here. Last night i left the house and left my laptop on as usual. I had some IE windows open or something i dont really remember, nothing big. Anyway when i came back the screen was black but the laptop was still on. I thought ok a crash it happens. When i reset it went to the advanced boot menu and i chose to start windows normaly. When it went to the screen with the Windows XP logo with the sliding bar it stayed there for a bit but then it froze there. I reset again and tried a couple of more times but still the same. I tried safe mode and it booted fine there. I tried to backup my stuff on my USB HDD but while copying a large folder it froze again and now i cant even go into safe mode. It just freezes in that screen where it loads all those driver and system files.

I have a lot of stuff that i dont want to delete so any help would be much appreciated.

BY the way i have a Sager 9890 with 2 ATA drives in raid 0... this is the last time i have a striped array...

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=151512

I had a similar problem. The laptop crashed at the start up a screen a few times like your problem, and then all my documents were in strange locations. Maybe the problems are linked?

Perhaps you could try a data recovery application that boots from DOS, just so that you can get your documents safe.

 

Sounds like your ram or maybe your hdd is going out.

Its possibly just a curropted windows install tho.

If the HDD is ok and you just need your data, hooking the hdd to another computer as a secondary drive should let you get your things just fine.

I happen to have a problem with my computer that I dont think is related to yours where it freezes at the same point IF I run from battery power, but it wont happen if I use the power cord. So even tho I think my problem is very isolated you may as well try that if you havnt done so already.

 

you could try doing a repair installation of XP from the cd.. this will leave your files well alone and just replace the system files... but.. the suggestion of taking the drive out and copying off your documents onto another machine is good advice... and I'd recommend doing that first if you try the repair installation option.

 

Step 1

If you have a windows xp cd, start the computer and boot with it and choose recovery console.

Then follow the instructions beginning at STEP 2

If you do not have a Windows XP CD, do the following


download RC.iso from the following link:

http://www.thecomputerparamedic.com/rc.iso

You need to burn this image to a CD and boot your computer with it--this is different than burning a file to a CD. If you do not know how to burn an ISO image, then download the following program to another Windows XP machine, install it.

make certain you download the proper installation for your version of windows. Open MY COMPUTER, choose HELP > ABOUT. Note the service pack and get the appropriate version of the iso burner power toy

http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm

After installation, reboot, then right click the RC.iso file you downloaded above and choose COPY IMAGE TO CD.

Then reboot your broken PC with that CD in the CD-ROM drive.

This will give you a recovery console to use to run

Insert the cd into the non-functioning PC



STEP 2

When boot begins, a windows setup will appear to start, but you will be taken to a recovery console.

You will need to select your windows installation by pressing a number, most likely 1

Windows will ask you for a password

If you have XP home, press enter...there is no password

If you have XP Pro, you need to enter the password you set when you installed your machine with XP Pro.

After entering the password, you will find yourself at a command prompt that looks like this

c:\windows

type
chkdsk /r
<enter>

follow the prompts, then when it is complete, remove the CD

type

EXIT

<enter>

the machine will reboot

Did that fix it?