This is quite a common problem for Windows user. You shutdown your computer as usual. The next morning, you power on your PC, go brush your teeth or do whatever business you have to do, be it big or small, or just stare blankly at your PC while it is booting up, as the screen reaches the Windows booting stage as shown in the picture below, it turns blank all of a sudden, and you find the computer goes back to when you first power on the PC and the whole process repeats (not the brushing teeth and business thing, mind you).
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| Windows XP boot up screen |
Don't panic. There's a few things you can do.
What you need:
- Your Windows Installation Disc which you used to install on your computer.
1st Step:
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| Standard BIOS POST boot up |
Right after the BIOS POST boot up stage, keep tapping F8 until you see the Windows XP Safe Mode menu.
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| Windows XP Safe Mode menu |
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| Dell BIOS POST boot up |
Select Safe Mode and press Enter.
In Safe Mode, back up all your important files, documents, data, savegames, profiles, pictures, mp3, movies to an external hdd, pendrive or a different partition (other than C:\).
In case booting up to Safe Mode still doesn't work, as in it's still trapped in that cursed infinite restart loop, don't panic, just move on to the next step.
2nd Step:
Now, we are going to repair the Windows system through Recovery Console using the Windows installation disc.
Pop in the Windows installation disc into the DVD-Rom drive and boot from the CD. (To boot from CD, at the BIOS POST boot up screen, it should tell you which button to press to go to the Boot Menu. Usually it's F9 or F10 or F12)
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| Windows main setup screen |
When you reach this screen, press R to go to the Recovery Console.
Recovery Console looks like Command Prompt or DOS Prompt. (will get a picture and post it up soon)
When C:\> appears, type this:-
C:\> chkdsk /r
press Enter. This will run a scan on your disc for any errors and it will attempt to fix it.
By the end of the process, type;
C:\> exit
and press Enter.
Take out the CD, restart your PC and boot normally. If it works, voila!
If it still doesn't work, don't panic, proceed to the next step.
3rd Step:
I will post it at later date =P
