Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Microsoft Madness!

I got an early Christmas gift from Microsoft on Monday. I downloaded the "service pack 2" update for XP and it hosed my home computer (I am posting from my work computer). Windows will not come up, it tries but then shuts down (over and over again).

I've been on the phone with Microsoft but the windows repair from the cd did not work. They have promised to have a "level 2" tech call me within 24-72 hours (45 hours and counting) with more/better help. It looks like I may have to reformat the hard drive and loose everything.

Is there anyway to avoid reformating the hard drive. Thanks for any advice in advance.

You can get another drive and load XP on it. Then make your old drive a second drive in the system. Then copy all of your data over to the new drive. Or you could just reload XP in a different directory on the drive you have now. You shouldn't have to reformat.

But it won't even start up to do anything except boot from cd.

I'm not on XP, I use 2000, but am curious, is there a Safe Mode you can boot up with...? I know in 95 and 98SE, you could hit like F8 or something like that during the BIOS boot sequence to get into a Safe Mode, then maybe from there you could make some progress...

That's why I said reload it into a different directory and call it winxp or something. It will be fresh install. You don't have to format your drive. All of your data will still be intact. You will need to reinstall your programs.
It will create a new boot.ini file and reload all of the drivers. After the install you will need to move your .dat files to the location(s) your programs will find them.

It won't even boot up in safe mode. It just shuts down as soon as it tries to start.

But it does boot from CD, correct? That means that at least the thing gets somewhere (which starts to rule out a hardware problem. I'm surprised you can't hit safe mode; that usually comes up very soon in the boot process. I'd try the second hard drive thing, myself. You just have to be careful that you're installing on the correct drive!

When you say when it tries to start, do you get to the Windows XP splash screen (with the little green progress bar on the bottom? If so, it's crashing after the point where safe mode would be accessed. Start hitting F8 right after you turn it on (just keep pressing it) and see if you hit the list of modes. If you can get it up in Safe Mode, then you can uninstall SP2 (and reapply it if you're brave!)

I (well Roger did most of the work) just upgraded my computer. New motherboard, new processor, new SATA hard drive, new RAM...XP didn't like it. We had the same problem you're describing. It wouldn't boot...just kept rebooting over and over. We had to load from the XP installation disc and do a "repair" rather than a full install. It took quite awhile, but once it was done I was good as new. (Well actually better since I added all the new stuff!)

you have whats called "the service pack 2 reboot cycle" spk2 is conflicting with something in your sys. did you say tried a repair install off the ms cd (which is essentially reloading a new os over the current os without losing data). also i dont know how computer savy you are but you could try these
ms article
repair install
prepare for spk2
but if you have access to another hard drive i would back everything up first then try or at that point just do the format and reload of os. also what cpu are you running if it is a intel presscott cpu there may be extra steps to get your pc to accept spk2. ****disclaimer advice is given free of charge with no liabilty to me if you want to try the above you do so at your own risk****

mwc, the second hard drive option is your best bet at preventing data loss. Drives are dirt cheap right now at under $1/gig. Install the new drive in your computer and installa fresh copy of XP on it. You'll be able to access your original drive and all the files on it. The only downside to this is that you'll still have to reinstall all your programs.