Windows failing to boot

[CarruthersIII]

Well figuring that most slot techs worked on computers at some point in time i figure i will see if i can get some help here...

I am working on a customers computer and the symptoms are that the computer starts to load, gets to the splash screen and restarts. Continuing on and on.
Have tried booting into safemode,
Tried repairing the install,
Tried a repair of the master boot record,
Tried a fix boot prompt,
The customer really does not want a format to happen, wondering if anyone here (rickhunter) can give me any insight into this. I belive that the kernel32 file is corrupt and cant seem to fix it.

Any ideas??? Thanks

Joey III

[edski]

This can happen if there has been a hardware change, such as a new hard drive, and the registry does not have the new information.
This has happened to me when I restore a drive image from backup and put it on a different brand hard drive, that Windoze hasn't "Found New Hardware", and installed drivers for.
Boots up, reads the Registry, then reboots.

Hold "F8" on reboot and choose "Disable automatic restart on system failure.

You'll then get a blue screen with a useless error code that might lead you somewhere.


Ed

[CarruthersIII]

Still have not got anywere with this, tried just putting the HardDrive in another computer to pull all the documents off of it and it says that "This disk is not formatted, would you like to format it?"
Looks like i am going to have to reformat.

[brichter]

How old is this drive, and who's the manufacturer?

[CarruthersIII]

How old is this drive, and who's the manufacturer?

The drive is MFG in 2003, and it is a Maxtor.

[brichter]

OK, Maxtor was acquired by Seagate many years ago, and 2003 is OLD for a hard drive.

Go to http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/ and download Seatools, run the diags against your drive. My guess is the drive will fail, and you should try to recover any data you can. It may be too far gone to save anything, but you can try putting it in a Ziploc bag and throwing it in the freezer for 20 minutes to an hour and try again. Sometimes you can access them for a little while after this.

[CarruthersIII]

Thanks for the info will give it go now, i will let you know what happens.

[rickhunter]

I recently ran into a similar problem, the issue was that the motherboard had bad caps.  Wasn't worth fixing (it had a pentium III 733Mhz CPU).

The disturbing thing is that putting the drive on a different system yields a Drive not formatted issue.  If you put back the drive into the old PC, does it still do the splash logo?  If it does, go into the CMOS and take note at how the BIOS is setting up the hard drive (LBA, CHS, and if available take a note at the logical cylinder and head configuration).  If these parameters do not match, you will get that "drive not formatted error" on the other PC, BUT THE DATA IS STILL THERE SO DON'T FORMAT IT.  Typically when the drive is so old, I STRONGLY suggest that the customer get a new hard drive, if he wants to use his old computer.  But if the drive is 2003, that means he's got a pretty old system.