Hp 8130us. with 2 hard drives.
XP Pro
AVG anti virus- SuperAntiSpyware-SB search & destroy

The machine has been working fine. HDDS are about 6 months old.
My daughter was on the web when suddenly windows just shut down.
Now, when I turn it on it will sort of boot up. It gets to the windows XP screen and windows shuts down immediately.
Goes to a screen that says Windows did not shut down normally... options to boot up in safe mode, or as the last KNOWN correct operation (or something like that).
I tried all the options. Nothing works.
During the start up you can press F10? and get to a set up page. It will stay there until you leave.

I tried reinstalling Windows. It goes through the part where it loads drivers. When it tries to start Windows it shuts down.
I THOUGHT it might be a hard drive so I took out the HDDS and reversed their positions and tried loading windows again but withe the same results.
Could it be a memory problem?
I'm at a loss. Any ideas?
Thanks,
JimWhat was she running when it shut down? A friend of mine had a similar issue with his Toshiba and it was because his kid cooked the GPU of the laptop playing video games that it barely supported, so when it went to load the graphics DRIVER the GPU would have a critical failure and windows would reboot. The GPU functioned enough to send text to screen, but as soon as Windows would load graphics crash and reboot. Knoppix also experienced same problems on this toshiba when loading the desktop.

A good diagnostic test for hardware would be to download and burn to a CD Knoppix Linux live distro and boot the laptop and run the laptop from this bootable live CD. You will then be able to tell if it is a hardware failure such as a GPU failure etc. Knoppix runs on about 99.9% of the systems out there with no problems. Problems mainly being with systems older than 6 years old of which limited driver support or brand new systems with chipsets that do not support generic drivers if a matching driver is not available.

If the laptop doesnt run that CD then its likely that the laptop has a serious hardware failure.

This CD also does not install anything to your system, it runs COMPLETELY off of the CD as a solid state read only operating system.

http://www.knoppix.org/

*If Knoppix runs fine then you likely have an issue with a hard drive, as for Knoppix does not require a HD to run. Go down to 1 drive instead of 2 and try again etc.

I also have heard of Windows updates causing problems with Software RAID systems. Did you have RAID running or just 2 drives for extra storage.Hi Dave,
She doesn't do the games. I think she was on Facebook when it went.
However, that used to be my machine and I frequently ran an RC flight simulator that worked it pretty hard. That was 6 months ago.
I thought hard drive also, that's why I switched them. I wouldn't think both drives would fail at the same time.
Currently my son took it to his house to see if he could figure it out. I'll see if I can get him to try the Knoppix thing.
Thanks,
Jim
Dave,
I just talked to my son. He already tried something similar to the Knoppix that you recommended. Some Linux thing, I can't remember now. He says it will run on that just fine!
The drives are set up as master for the OS and the slave for extra storage. I suggested putting the slave in the master position by itself. He says he tried that but it wouldn't boot up. I remember there was a jumper on one of the drives. I asum it was on the master? He didn't see it and so did not install the jumper when he tried just the 1 drive.
I will try to get the machine BACK tomorrow and try again.
Could I test the drives by putting them in an external holder and plug into the usb port on my good machine?
JimThat should work fine, just remember the jumpers.