EMEMGENCY....XP will not boot up!!!

[rreed55]

I have been working all morning with absolutly no luck. I came home to my parents house and was running some maintnence on their computer, checking for spyware/adware, and left the room and the computer had rebooted and I was getting errors such as an 0x800705a error when i tried to boot up, I tried a few more things and came up with more erors such as, error loading line 422, and cann't initialize userint.exe. I am unable to to get booted up at all. each time it stops me as i try to load windows. I am unable to boot up in safe mode, or load my last "good" configuration. When i try to repair the system, booting up from my windows CD, it tells me "cannot normaly execute the initial settings of partition information. This utility exists and your computer is rebooted." I am out of ideas.

Their anti-virus program was expired as well.....

Some of the other specs are it is a pentium 4 processor....i'm not sure how fast...80 gb HD, with 512 mb or RAM. It is runing Windows XP, w/o service pack 2.

Thanks
Ryan

 

[mechBgon]

What exactly was the computer working on at the time when you left the room?

You could try a Repair-mode installation by ignoring the first Repair option and going with the "install Windows now." Once it reaches the display of disk partitions and asks where you want your new Windows installation, point it at the C:\ partition and it will (hopefully) see the C:\WINDOWS directory and offer to Repair that one. Now you choose Repair.

When you do this, you should keep the network cable unplugged the entire time, until you have firewall protection. Your raw non-SP2 Windows install will be vulnerable to worms without a firewall. I have some practical suggestions to help with this situation. Simply installing and configuring ZoneAlarm before plugging in the network cable would be sufficient, or install Service Pack 2 and then you'll have the wormholes patched and the Windows Firewall activated too.

Also, before proceeding, it might be good to throw the hard drive into another computer as a secondary drive, and do an exhaustive antivirus scan on it using up-to-date antivirus software, preferably a type that is aware of spyware/adware too.

 

[rreed55]

Thanks for the reply. It was running Adaware, when it shut down the first time. When i try to Repair it from the disk, it doesn't even let me get to the screen where it asks if i want to run a fresh install or repair my system. I've never seen anything like it.....That's a good idea taking our the hard drive though and connecting it to another computer to run a virus scan. I'll have to give that a try...

 

[mechBgon]

Sounds like possibly a hard-disk failure. There are links to the various HDD manufacturer's diagnostic utilities at the bottom of this page if it comes down to that