Laptop won't start, continual reboots

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Hi all
I have a user that put his laptop into hibernate one night and the next morning it came up with a boot error and wouldn't start. After 2 times of trying to start from the hibernated state it put itself into a loop of continual restarts. It starts, comes up with the screen that gives you the choice of safe mode's or boot normally. It doesn't matter which option you take windows will start and after 3 seconds of showing the boot screen it flashes a blue screen for a 10th of a second and restarts.

He said that from the time that he shut down to the time he restarted absolutely nothing changed.

I've taken out anything that could be taken out, repaired the MBR, tried to repair the boot files but nothing works and I'm out of ideas except to put the HDD into an external caddy, pull the data off and reinstall the system. The problem with that is I don't really have the time for it.

Any ideas??

 

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Is there a disk that can be used to do a repair installation?

 

Possibly, a power source issue.

 

Boot with a PE disk - change the registry entry that forces a reboot on error and see what it is saying!

(That would be my first try - when I'm sober I may come up with other ideas....)

Harry.

 

With my (limited) experience, I would say XP and hibernation really is pot luck! With some hardware/manufacturers it just *works* whilst others just causes problems like you describe. Sorry it isn't a suggestion, but i thought I would give my 2p anyhow!

Anything (useful) in event viewer?

Simon

 

Agreed... hibernation and standby mode don't work "as advertised".

 

could be hardware related, although you could try repairing the installation from the windows disk or even try to see if you can get knoppix to boot

grim

 

A wild stab in the dark but what about booting into a live linux OS and renaming hiberfil.sys (rename it mind you). then try and boot into windows. Im not sure what would happen and I suppose that it must set an entry somewhere to say the machine was hibernated last time but if it cant find the file it might boot normally!??!

As I say wild stab in the dark but thats what I would try!

 

To find out what the BSOD error is, record the screen with a video phone and and boot up, then transfer the video to another computer and watch stopping the film at teh relevant moment.


i invented this technique myself, very effective!!!

 

looks like a windows error - try to get that 0x... code from BOSD
ManicD told u how

 

i know you said it doesn't matter what option you choose, but there should be three safe mode options, 1. safe mode 2. safe mode with networking and 3. safe mode with command line. the command line option has a good possibility of booting and then you can attempt a command line system restore. i have done it a few times on computers that have continual boot loops. it could be worth a shot as everything that is needed is built into windows.

http://www.tech-recipes.com/windows_tips780.html

this is a link on doing the command line restore.

hope it helps.

 

First of all thanks for all the replies.

I've now found out the BSOD code 0x00000024 which tells me that it's a file system corruption.

It's definitely file system related. Ive tried knoppix and it boots fine but I can't do anything. It's all read/write protected (ntfs system).

Tried this but you can't write to an ntfs partition. I'm sure that there is something that tells the system that it is in hibernate mode as when I found the command to mount an ntfs system, knoppix told me that the system is in hibernate mode and I should start the system and do a proper shutdown and not hibernate.

I've tried this too (all options) but it gets to a certain point in the boot process and then BSODs and reboots. It doesn't even get to the logi in screen.


I've also tried creating so many BartPE boot disks and also custom boot disks from my winternals erd (averaged at 3 per night). At first it didn't see the disk because it didn't have the right sata controllers installed. After countless hours of searching the net, all the driver configs that I need, more boot disks burned, I'm still no closer to solving the problem.


So, to summarise,

taken an image of the partition with acronis true image
removed the hdd and tried accessing it from an external caddy: file system corrupt or unreadable
booted from knoppix 5.1: sees the disk but cannot write to it to replace files or change anything
booted from winternals 2005 disk: didn't see the hdd so could not do anything
customised and booted from many winternals boot disks: still didn't see the hdd so could not do anything

I feel the my custom disk can now take on anything that HP/Intel decide to throw at it but can I access this one laptop. Oh no.

The one boot disk that can fix the problem can't see the hdd and the one boot disk that can see the hdd can't fix the problem.

Any other ideas?

 

Nugg,

Have you tried Spinrite?

 

No.

Doing this right at this very moment.

 

If you can hook it up as an external drive on a working pc you could try right clicking on the drive and then selecting tools and error checking with both options ticked

I have done this myself before to fix file corruption on what were goosed OS's that wouldnt start


worth a try

 

Well, it finished the first scan at level 2 and it looks like it found nothing wrong.

I've started another scan at level 3 so I guess I'll see in the morning.

 

Fingers crossed Nugg