Bad Shutdown, Now No Boot

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Friend of mine’s sister was surfing on her HP Pavilion desktop which runs XP Home, when she accidentally kicked the power button with her toe. PC shut down, and now it will not start up. Brings up the screen saying Windows was not shut down properly, and offering her the usual choices of how to start the PC. None of them work: no matter which one is selected, the Windows logo comes up for a couple seconds, then the screen either flashes a BSOD so quickly it can’t be read, followed by the HP logo (if she chooses “Start Windows Normally” or “Last Known Good Configuration”) or the Windows logo is immediately followed by the HP logo (if she chooses “Safe Mode”). Then the original “how do you want to start Windows” screen comes back. Any suggestions?

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I believe and HP system comes with a recovery disk of some sort. If so, I’d give it a try first. Good luck!

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I believe and HP system comes with a recovery disk of some sort. If so, I’d give it a try first. Good luck!

My experience with manufacturers recovery disks is that they take the PC back to the state it was in when purchased, wiping out everything put on the PC since then. NOT what I want to do!

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Did you try booting into safe mode and then run a chkdsk in “DOS” mode?

Hit and hold the F8 key upon starting your PC and then choose safe mode…
See if that helps..

Joe Sica

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Did you try booting into safe mode and then run a chkdsk in “DOS” mode?

Hit and hold the F8 key upon starting your PC and then choose safe mode…
See if that helps..

Joe Sica

Holding F8 down gave me a longer list of startup choices, but picking Safe Mode there didn’t work: the long list of file names scrolled by, then the PC went to the same “short” list of startup choices I was seeing before.

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I had this same thing happen on an older Dell Dimension 4400 after installing XP SP3 (which was unsuccessful). I get in a continuous loop of the start-up choices – no matter which is chosen, it just restarts and cycles through the loop again. I tried to boot from the original XP installation disk, but nothing happens. The 4 lights on the rear of the CPU (yellow, yellow, green, green) indicated a memory problem. I’ve changed the memory chips but still the same problem. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

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Sounds like a Fixmbr scenario; Boot to the XP installation disk, get yourself into the recovery console, more specifically a command prompt environment, and use the “chkdsk /r /f” and “fixmbr” commands, respectively.

[edit]
fixmbr is the main one, the chkdsk can be run later if successful.
Going into the bios and disabling “allow quick, or fast boot” may provide more time to view any displayed errors messages.

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Sounds like a Fixmbr scenario; Boot to the XP installation disk, get yourself into the recovery console, more specifically a command prompt environment, and use the “chkdsk /r /f” and “fixmbr” commands, respectively.

[edit]
fixmbr is the main one, the chkdsk can be run later if successful.

Well, if you meant I could run chkdsk after fixmbr got the PC booting properly, that didn’t happen. Ran fixmbr, PC wouldn’t boot normally. Ran chkdsk, THEN ran fixmbr, and PC is now working properly.

Thought it odd that I couldn’t run the chkdsk command with both the R and F switches, so I ran it with the ? switch and got a screen saying only P and R switches could be used! So I just ran it with the R switch. Subsequently read an article that says F is indeed a valid switch, but it implies that you can’t run R and F on the same pass, because R includes the function of F.

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Yeah, just the “r” will do. I don’t know where I got the idea for the “f”, or both for that matter.
As long as it gets the job done. Did you have any problems getting into the recovery console, or did you use some other
boot CD/USB?

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Yeah, just the “r” will do. I don’t know where I got the idea for the “f”, or both for that matter.
As long as it gets the job done. Did you have any problems getting into the recovery console, or did you use some other
boot CD/USB?

Used a standard XP Home CD.

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Some usefull Windows XP links for future reference….
Langa Letter: A Must-Have Repair And Recovery Tool
Langa Letter: The OS Inside The OS (Recovery Console)
Langa Letter: XP’s Little-Known ‘Rebuild’ Command
How to install and use the Recovery Console in Windows XP

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Might be worth turning off the option that causes XP to automatically reboot after an error. It wouldn’t have solved the problem by itself, but at least it would stop at the blue screen and let you read the error message.
Go to System Properties > Advanced Tab > Startup and Recovery Settings button > and uncheck “Automatically restart” in the System Failure section.

Another useful tool for getting the error message during a spell of constant rebooting… a camera and a nimble trigger finger.

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