Labtop Keeps Crashing!

Yeah my mom gave me her labtop today and tlold me to fix the dang thing. I thought No problem, just boot up in Safe Mode. Well After trying every setting that Windows XP allows me to do it still won't boot up.

It basically turns on I get the stupid Windows XP logo with the white squares telling me it's going to load Windows in 10 secondes or somthing. But then I get a black screen telling me windows has a hardware or software problem it gives me options like boot up in Safe Mode, SafeMode with C:\, Safemode with networking and anyway I do those first and nothing works so out of curiousity I try All the options it gives me. All of them take me to a Screen where it decides to scan the drives, so I figure that's ok and once it finishes. I get the blue screen of death telling my it needs to restart. That's all it's doing one big loop over and over againg

System settings
Ok it's Running Windows XP pro and it's got about 5gb of hard drive space.There is a Cd=drive but no floopy drive. Well I asked if she has downloaded any new software or e-mail attachments, anything at all she said no. So now I"m thinking since it's not software it's hardware. I don't know maybe the hard drive got destroyed or somthing.

Help Please!
I will keep udated on this one.

Is reinstalling an option Freeon? I haven't much experience with XP, but I think you can reinstall the OS without formatting your drive - if that doesn't work, you can always use more drastic methods later.

For now, get a hold of a bootable XP installation disk and insert that into the laptop. Make sure that in BIOS, under "boot sequence" (or something like that) CDROM before HDD, and reboot. After boot, an installer should pop up...

Good luck!

There has been a problem with some windows xp machines and laptops - Check out the article below -

http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/ne...099162,00.html

hey I can't even do a re-install. Or reformat it. I can't get to a dos-prompt and none of the options that it gives me does anything but restart the damn computer. I've tried using the system configuration disks which are a boot up disk but it doesn't work.

Any chance you have a spare laptop HD lying around? I suppose if you did you would have already tried it but see if you can't borrow one from a friend or something. Also have you tried booting from a different OS system disk? I don't know if XP will allow it but you may try booting off a win98 floppy (if you have a floppy drive to put in it) and then using the dos prompt to get on your hardrive to see if it responds. If you go "cd c:" and it says unreadable media or something gay like that then it's probably your HD.
Problem with trying the above is that maybe XP has newer stuff and will say "incompatiable dos" or something... I have never tried this on WinXP so I'm not speaking from experiance, just preXP theory.

The XP machines I HAVE worked on supposedly keep a image of the original files on the HD instead of giving you recovery disks. That's great and all if you can access it...however you see the problem if you can't get to the image.

Hope this helps...
-DarC

If even programs from the bootcd are failing, you probably have some bad hardware (can't be your HD, because you aren't running progs from your HD, right? - you can always check that by simply detaching your HD...). Anyway, my guess is bad memory - I had something similar with a bad DIMM... try to replace that, or better yet: bring it in for service...

Yeah I have windows 98 Red Hat Linux and XP nothing works. I'm starting to think it was the damn hard drive. I can't get to a dos prompt so there is no C:\ or cd stuff. I'll try making a bootable disk with the sysetem recovery on it. Anyway it probably won't work.

If I pull the hard drive out will It cause any big errors?

Quote:

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Originally posted by freeOn


I get the blue screen of death telling my it needs to restart. That's all it's doing one big loop over and over againg

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What BSoD is it? As larryjs posted in Ennis's thread on Blue Screens, there is actually proper information in the BSoD's. :eek:.. rather than make you go look for it yourself, here is the link to the post on BSoD's ..

That might help you locate the cause of the errors.

ok hint.. check ur RAM and ur Video Card..

boot the 'puter on a boot-floppy/CD or just throw in some linux install-disk... that'll allow u to format and whatever u want to do with it... all u need is BIOS access i case the 'puter is set to autoboot on CD's etc..

Yeah I was able to get to bios and then run a diagnostics from a Program that I have. I connected the laptop to my other computer and it basically told me there is no hard drive. Which sucks but anyway what I was seeing on the screens I guess is what the bios is programmed with. Not sure though but I do know the hard disk is gone.