boot loop

  • Thread starter Thread starter Robert Wood
  • Start date Start date
R

Robert Wood

I've been running XP for a year now, without major
problems. Last week I experienced some sudden, unwanted
restarts, nothing too bad. But now suddenly, I can't
start XP anymore. Whenever I boot, I get the nice screen
with the 'knightrider' progress bar, but after that, a
bluescreen flashes for about 1/10th of a second, and it
restarts. I think the message says: "STOP:c0000021a" and
whatever, but I'm not sure (went berserk trying to read
it time and time again).
Any help, or ideas what's going wrong, are greatly
appreciated!
Is there anyplace I can do an online search with this
errorcode?
 
You're on the right track. The first thing to do is to prevent the blue
screen from going away - you want to see what it's telling you. To see the
blue screen do this: Start > right click My Computer > Properties > Advanced
Startup and Recovery Settings > remove the checkmark from 'Automatically
Click to expand...
restart'. Now the blue screen will stay.

You're looking for three pieces of information: the first number after the
word STOP (it has an 'x' in it); any character strings all in caps joined by
underscores (e.g., IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL); and the names of any files that
Windows is telling you have problems. Armed with this information, you can
troubleshoot your problem.

A good place to start your research is the Microsoft Knowledge Base at
http://support.microsoft.com/support/search/c.asp?FR=0. You can also search
these newsgroups to see how these errors were explained in the past (or
simply post the information and ask for help.) I know that there are a large
number of resources on the Web that explain these errors, and show you how
to fix them. I cannot suggest specifically where to look because I'm in the
fortunate position to never have encountered these errors personally.

Tom Swift
 
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