Windows XP problem, not booting

[morganlefay]

Yea right man. Rebooting has always been a Windows strong point. Windows failing a reboot is like Bush passing a spelling bee.

Gore

You have to learn the windows reboot hoo doo dance

Consists of crossing your fingers and toes.............. closing your eyes while spining counterclockwise and muttering BOOT BOOT BOOT over and over .....until you see the logon screen

Works for me

As for updates...I only get critical...unless there is a specific issue where I need a hotfix or some patch.....

MLF

[sec_ware]

Hi

I think it is of importance to understand the startup process of
an operating system to troubleshoot such issues. I have found
the "Troubleshooting the Startup Process"-Guide[1] a good read.

In particular, you can disable the "blue bar" and enable a listing
of the drivers currently loaded by a minor modification of c:\boot.ini. Add two
options to the default loader:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /sos /noguiboot

I have found the option "/bootlog" useful as well.


There are various ways to track down the particular source of error while
startup. Note that you have several layers, which can be responsible for it,
among them the boot loader phase, the hardware detection and configuration
phase, the kernel loading phase, the logon phase.


Cheers


[1] http://www.microsoft.com/technet/pro...c29621675.mspx

[RoadClosed]

So how did the boot time **** get touched at all with updates to IE?

Cause you shut it down on boot. When a known update was still being applied.

To answer your question on boot messages, yes Linux is MUCH better at displaying boot messages, google the magic word.... bootvis. (in addition to what sec has mentioned.)

[gore]

I shut it down after about 5 minutes of no disk activity and it just sitting there.

[RoadClosed]

I have to admit I am so paranoid of server reboots that I always make a backup of the system state and make an ERD before rebooting. Seriously though I wait a long time before shutting a system down. Don't forget gore that IE is PART of the OS. It doesn't just hang off as an application.

[The Duck]

So how did the boot time **** get touched at all with updates to IE?

Well the update obviously did something to the "boot time ****" because the problem occured after you updated and rebooted... If you're disagreeing with this then that means the update had nothing to do with your computer not booting and therefore your 'complaint' is useless. In other words, if your argument were true, you would be proving yourself wrong ...

RoadClosed pretty much summed it up pretty well in his last post...

Don't forget gore that IE is PART of the OS. It doesn't just hang off as an application.

[gore]

Well it was worth a shot to get something going in here. No one wanted to say what part of the booting IE could have touched, just that it did?

[The Duck]

Well it was worth a shot to get something going in here. No one wanted to say what part of the booting IE could have touched, just that it did?

Now, I know that it's always good to have as muich knowledge as possible, knowledge is power... But honestly, do you really care enough to know EXACTLY what happened? What part of the update changed which setting in which file in one small part of the boot process? I for one do not, It is not necessary to know all of this to fix the problem, you proved that...

Here's my challenge to you gore... If your really interested then I suggest you do some research on the subject. Then come back and educate us all...

I doubt your as interested now, as it is quite a boring subject .

[nihil]

Hmmm,

No one wanted to say what part of the booting IE could have touched, just that it did?

Who cares? That sort of thing happens with Billy Windows, and you have destroyed the evidence. I would suggest not using the automatic update. The two favourites are a corrupted download or a deadly embrace.

Now, where you are getting this kind of crap consistently/regularly, then you should boot into safe mode and check the logs and the boot log. That should tell you where it is happening, which might give you a clue.

I bet you were running all sorts of crap when that happened, which is why I suggested a deadly embrace What amuses/amazes me is that MS produce this fancy auto updater, then want you to shut down all other programs processes etc. when they know damn fine that it will prompt you smack in the middle of something?

As you might have guessed, I don't use the auto-updater, and have had no update problems (apart from losing the internet connection) in the past couple of years.

I find it somewhat disappointing that this does happen fairly regularly, yet AV and other security products manage to update without any significant problems. OK I know that is generally not so complex, but even when they are updating the engines, they work OK.

I guess the difference is that most of the MS stuff are patches to faulty code/systems whilst the other guys are just doing regular updates like geting your automobile serviced?