Stuck on endless boot cycle

[edawood]

Not as such. Ran a disk check a few days ago but since then nothing at all. just normal startups and shutdowns.

HOWEVER, the previous week had to swap my HHD onto another Sata controllor as that was playing up, could be a dying M/b although this seems more like an O/S thing to me or a corrupted entry in the system.

I'll try to get into safe mode


I can select SAFE mode but it wont complete. Goes into the same re-boot cycle again.

Sorry I am so late in responding to this post, I have been out of town for several days.

From what you mentioned, it sounds like the problem is in switching to another SATA controller. The FAT does not recoqnize the configuragion since the switch was made, and cannot figure out what to do.

Getting the boot failure (continuous loop) could be the results of a dying hard drive or corrupted boot files. If the hard drive is not going south, you might be able to reinstall the OS from a CD.

You could also have contracted a virus or trojan horse. Either of these will put you into a continuous boot loop. If that is the case, run the virus/trojan horse scanning software from CD or in safe move (provided you can boot into safe mode).

Good luck
Ed Wood

 

[Fire cat]

Sorry I am so late in responding to this post, I have been out of town for several days.

From what you mentioned, it sounds like the problem is in switching to another SATA controller. The FAT does not recoqnize the configuragion since the switch was made, and cannot figure out what to do.

Getting the boot failure (continuous loop) could be the results of a dying hard drive or corrupted boot files. If the hard drive is not going south, you might be able to reinstall the OS from a CD.

You could also have contracted a virus or trojan horse. Either of these will put you into a continuous boot loop. If that is the case, run the virus/trojan horse scanning software from CD or in safe move (provided you can boot into safe mode).

Good luck
Ed Wood

He can't boot into safe mode.

Though, using an Ultimate Boot CD should work. Did for me.
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/http://www.ubcd.org

 

[Mychael]

Thanks for msg edawood but you'll see in one of my posts further back I tried doing a recovery using the original cd, all seemed to work but in the end a fail.
Taken the drive out now and given it to my tame geek in the hopes of a recovery and copy onto a new HDD. Currently working under my copy of Mint 8 to keep online.

 

[edawood]

Thanks for msg edawood but you'll see in one of my posts further back I tried doing a recovery using the original cd, all seemed to work but in the end a fail.
Taken the drive out now and given it to my tame geek in the hopes of a recovery and copy onto a new HDD. Currently working under my copy of Mint 8 to keep online.

If indeed the FAT on the SATA drive is not readable in a different computer, you need to surf the web for some software that will allow you to recover the data on the drive.

In years past, I used to take a perfectly good working drive out of one box and place it in another box only to get error messages ranging fro NTDR missing boot files, to a totally frozen system on boot, and think that the drive had gone bad. Then one day, I tried fomatting the drive. That's how I discovered that the different box could not read the FAT on the swapped disk, and that the disk was not bad at all. Wasted a few good HDD's that way.

Best Wishes,
Ed Wood

 

[Nibiru2012]

How old is the system running XP? Your mobo may be ready to give up the ghost if it's over 6 years old or so.

 

[Mychael]

mobo was initially my first thought. However can still run all other devices including this Linux O/S off the same M/B and the drive holding my Windows O/S was tried on other controllers before we removed. Various disk check programs we tried whislt the drive was still connected showed no errors.
Some sort of virus on the HDD is a possibility I suppose but I've never had a virus and keep my firewalls and AV programs up to date and on all the time.
M/B would be about 4yrs old.

 

[Nibiru2012]

Have you done an AV scan yet? That just may be the problem.

Remember what happened to me last week with that darn virus that got past everything and did a massive FUBAR on my system.

 

[Mychael]

Good point, although prior to the day when it ceased to boot everything was ok. Everything 'ops normal'.
The drive is now with my tame tech guy, he will hopefully check everything out.

My 'system' such as it is now is working on another HDD that was attached but unused, I put Mint 8 on it and here we are, so I doubt I could have done that if motherboard or bios etc had been fragged by something.

 

[Nibiru2012]

Mychael, I hope you get this worked out. I know how frustrating these situations can be.
Keep us posted on the results!

 

[catilley1092]

Had my techy mate up last night.We ran WD disk diagnostics on the drive (It's a WD drive) and all came up with no errors?? Despite that cannot get it to boot into the O/S.
We tried the drive in different ports, nothing worked so he's taken it away with him to see what he can do to save/clone it.

We'll buy either a WD500g Cavier Green for $65 or a WD black for $69. Apparently the green runs cooler but the black has a 5yr warranty.

It's a nuisance as these were not the drives I was planning to buy for my new system but I need to keep my XP machine running a bit longer. Till I've got everything I need and am ready to make the re-build swap.

In the interim my Linux on the spare drive in the PC and Macs are keeping me online.

If you haven't already bought it, the Caviar Black is a better drive. That's what my main drive is now. The stock one is a Caviar Blue, I put in a case to use as a USB drive for Mint. Runs good, since I've found the correct port to plug it into.

I know that this may be too little, too late. But you need a good backup plan. Macrium Reflect is the best free backup on the market. If you're getting Windows 7, the backup in it is the best that MS has ever had. Personally, I've used both, and recovered with both. If you plan to keep XP, Macrium would be a great solution for you. You don't really need an expensive backup drive, one that will backup your OS & data is good enough.

Cat

 

[Mychael]

If you haven't already bought it, the Caviar Black is a better drive. That's what my main drive is now. The stock one is a Caviar Blue, I put in a case to use as a USB drive for Mint. Runs good, since I've found the correct port to plug it into.

I know that this may be too little, too late. But you need a good backup plan. Macrium Reflect is the best free backup on the market. If you're getting Windows 7, the backup in it is the best that MS has ever had. Personally, I've used both, and recovered with both. If you plan to keep XP, Macrium would be a great solution for you. You don't really need an expensive backup drive, one that will backup your OS & data is good enough.

Cat

Will most likely get the black although for the new system I was aiming for the more expensive WD Velociraptors as I have now, they also have 5yr warranty but more expensive for less size.
Everything is backed up offline with Carbonite although it wont have saved desktop settings and not sure about things like emails and address books.

It's always a pain to recover desktop and settings exactly as I'd had them before, when I finally get the new machine done and running I'm seriously thinking about a small NAS server for home backup to all our computers with hot swap capability of HDD. All gets down to money.

 

[catilley1092]

You said a mouthful there, seems like we always want to improve or upgrade our computers. I have to agree with you, it always comes to money. There's a couple of more upgrades that I want, but for the present time, it will have to wait for that reason.

 

[Mychael]

Latest update. My tech mate copied the files across to another drive but they are corrupted, why? we don't know. The drive itself seems to test okay but somehow between shutting down normally one evening and trying to start the next day something screwed up.
He is questioning a failing M/B and that is a possibility as it's 3 yrs old now however I'm running Mint 8 on it and all seems to be okay and it would be close to two weeks now.
I think I'll do nothing for now as I don't want to spend money on a drive if the issue is the M/B and I'm trying to save up to get all the stuff for my full re-build.
If he can establish without a doubt that the drive is still good then I might just get the new M/B and processor and get going from there. I'll stripe my two small velociraptors to get a bit more space and just install Win 7 and nothing else.

 

[Mychael]

Well the final outcome is, "we don't really know". The drive shows perfect in all tests and we can pull the files off it but it refuses to boot and the MBR is corrupted and re-installing from the windows CD fails.. so we gave up in the end.
I've been running this computer with Linux Mint but finally got around to re-installing XP Pro again. Sheesh it make me appreciate Linux even more, from formated HDD to running on Linux, about 30 mins, for XP hours and been tweaking all day. Pity Linux cant run everything I need.
So basically back to were I was weeks ago and hopefully this will all hang there in till get I get everything together for my Win 7 machine.

 

[yodap]

Were you able to access those "corrupted files" with Mint?

 

[Mychael]

Were you able to access those "corrupted files" with Mint?

Well we never tried. I'd removed the drive and gave it to my tame Geek to work on, he fixes computers for a living and also at that stage we were not even sure if the problem wasn't with my M/B. However given the fact I could install & run Linux and then later on install and run XP on my 2nd HDD seems to point to something else.