After thought> is your pc caught in a never ending rebooting cycle and no access to safemode either? if so then my earlier suggestion applies, Regards Merete
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Xp reboots on startup
Xp reboots on startup, whether I try normal or safe mode. It reboots about 3 seconds into the XP start screen. I see a blue screen flash too quickly to read and the reboot starts. In safe mode it gets to the Mups file. None of the other choices help either.
If I try to re-setup xp or a reinstall of xp, with the setup cd, by choosing, Enter, the next screen says "To set up xp on the selected item, press enter. the selected item in a lower box, says C: Partition1 (unknown) 38194MB (which is the right size). Instead of showing (unknown) it should say NTFS. Chosing Enteragain results in "the partition is either too full, damaged, unformatted, or formatted with an incompatible file system. To continue, Setup must format this partition.
The drive is a 40 gig, single NTFS partition. I can put this drive in another winxp computer as the second drive, and read it with Windows Explorer just fiine. This is not my computer, and the person who owns it has no backups whatsoever and does not want it formatted.
Any ideas? thanx computerchuck
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Answers
If you can put the drive into another computer and read it without problems then you have the option of copying all the important data to the other computer then formatting the drive and reinstalling windows. In this case the person has nothing to worry about since you would have just backed up their data for them.
Also take a look at this article before you do format the drive.
Try the fixboot and fixmbr tools after backing up the data.
After I had situation when Windows XP rebooted on startup (and no diff if I choose Safe or VGA mode), I just inserted WinXP setup disk, booted from it, chose Recovery console, did chkdsk /repair, and after it everything was ok. Not sure if this is the same situation, cause I didn't try to re-install Windows.
ok.. something is defected, and most likely its not your hard drive, did you put anything new in?? RAM? Video Card? New PCI card? anything new? Try taking out the video card swapping it with another and try loading again, same with with other things, (pci cards.. ram..etc..)
also, try reseting the bios on your motherboard. (I could give you instructions on that if you give me your brand and type).
this might sound crazy but if you have a digital camera with a digital zoom, try taking a picture of the blue screen right when it comes up so you could see the error at the bottom.. (p.s. that might take a while.. i had to do it before..)
Does anybody have an idea on how to fix this same problem with a laptop? I can understand taking out a hard drive from a normal pc, putting it into another pc, running a virus can on the drive, then removing any data to another drive and just reformatting and reinstalling XP. I'm not sure what would be the best action to do with this laptop hard drive that has the same symptoms as described (I'm getting the same exact error when I try to reinstall XP as originally posted by Computerchuck).
Ok, I tried the chkdsk /repair and it worked like a CHARM!! :) The laptop is now up and running, and I'm going to try the same simple fix on my old pc's hard drive that "crashed" last June to see if I can recover 4 months of email and 3500+ mp3's. Thanks for the help on this forum, it's a little strange that it found 1 error and fixed it and that was the cause of this problem, but that's that it goes! Thanks again..
the partition is either too full, damaged, unformatted, or formatted with an incompatible file system. To continue, Setup must format this partition
This topic decribes my situation perfectly, but the accepted solution isn't working. I have a 300G drive that originally contained a single NTFS 128G partition and was booting nicely in WindowsXP. After I expanded that partiton to fill the drive using Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0, it now gets a blue screen and reboots during the Windows boot. Safe Mode freezes at the MUP.SYS file. Setting the partition size back to 128G did not resolve the problem. The volume is perfectly readable in another machine under WinXP. Chkdsk and scandisk find no errors. AVG does not find any virus. Windows repair reports a 279G Partition1 [Unknown]. What else should I try?
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by: MeretePosted on 2004-04-23 at 04:11:22ID: 10898216
Hello computerchuck, You have probably picked up a virus called CHOKE,
You have damaged your HAL.DLL>Hardware abstraction layer dll or HAL. Windows need this to start and run.
Only solution is to go to bios configure it to boot from cdrom then hdd, put your windows cd in and run setup.
If you want to save your hdd, You will need another pc and make yours a slave by moving the pin to slave, and copy off all your stuff. Then remove it and restore it to its original, and put it back into your main pc and reinstall windows. It is a virus called choke as far as I can find out as I had the same thing recently. There is no other way believe me I tried to fix it as well.
This is the simplest way. regards Merete