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Solve : emergency! pc not starting in safe more or normal!?

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PC OPERATING system: Windows XP Professional Edition (lol not home sorry 'bout that)

My computer locked up yesterday and I had to hard boot it.  When I rebooted it back up it GOT past the screen where it says windows xp professional and instead of GOING into the choose user screen all you see is a black screen with the mouse pointer.  No hotkeys work and the only thing that you can do it do is a hard boot.  When it boots back up it gives you the thing about safe mode, so it must not be getting past the point where it considers it to be a successful boot.  When choosing "last known good configuration" it restores but it is no good still.  Booting into safe mose gives you nothing more than normal mode except for things saying safe mode in the corners.  Same black screen with mouse pointer.  I ran a virus scan in dos from the norton antivirus 2005 disk.  Nothing came up even with it set to scan all drives and the heuristics set to their highest sensitivity level.  I ran a scandisk and it came up with 100kb of lost clusters which it saved to a file.  It was blank except for about 5kb of junk at the end.  The surface scan returned nothing.  I ran a scanreg and it came out clean and saved a backup file.  I'm pretty well stumped and would love any help on this. Quote

PC operating system: Windows XP home Professional Edition

What does that mean? Home or Pro? Service pack?

What was going on when it "locked up"?

Virus and spyware protection?

Have you run the free diagnostics from the appropriate hard drive maker's site?

Do you have a real XP CD if that is required?

Other recent issues with the machine?

when attempting to boot in  safe mode, when you get the blank screen press ctrl alt delete. then from new task try typing in explorer.exe, if it works try doing a system restore

if you have a xp cd , you can try running the recovery console and try some of the fix commandIt is service pack 2, sorry about that.  At the time of the crash I had spysweeper, sygate personal firewall and Norton antivirus 2005 running with all shields and the latest virus definitions.  Pressing anything on the keyboard such as ctr;+alt+del doesn't do anythying.  It just sits there.  At the time of the crash I was extracting files from a windows cabinet file for use on trying to get my new laptop to run windows 98.  It started to freeze up and then totally just stopped responding.  I think hard-booting my pc corrupted some major system file.  I do not have a windows xp disk because I got my pc off Ebay and of course they STOLE the cd.  The recovery feature on my system is a peice of junk.  It just gives you an option to format your hard drive.  I ran all sorts of diagnostics on my hard drive and they all came up clean.  Recently I had a slight problem with the power supply but I fixed that.  Is there a way to ru na system restore from dos?  If there is it would probably fix this.Everyone needs a real Windows CD sooner or later. In your case it appears to be sooner.

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At the time of the crash I was extracting files from a windows cabinet file for use on trying to get my new laptop to run windows 98.

No doubt you overwrote some critical file(s) and hosed the system. The hard reboot certainly did not IMPROVE things.

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Is there a way to ru na system restore from dos?  If there is it would probably fix this.

You will need a Windows CD.Running system restore without a CD is possible, provided you can start in safe mode with a command prompt.

Info here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/304449/


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