Stuck at half an XP Welcome screen ??

  • Thread starter Thread starter DMS
  • Start date Start date
D

DMS

I was testing 3 or 4 network cards by turning of the machine (a fully
updated XP Pro AMD machine) and substituting them one at a time for the
machine's normal Network card and restarting. Everything was going normally
until someone came by and using their breath a la birthcake candle style,
tried to blow some the dust off the motherboard.



The machine locked up and will not reboot normally into Windows since. It
gets as far as the first part of the Welcome screen. I get XP's normal
darker blue bar at the top of the screen, the rest of the screen is the
normal lighter blue but the account logon icons, and Welcome text of any
sort and the darker blue bar normally located at the bottom of the screen
are missing. I can't get any farther with the normal boot process.



I find however, that I am able to successfully boot in Safe Mode. Once
there, in Device manager under Network Devices, I curiously find that I can
see ALL of the network cards I had been testing listed.



I have tried unsuccessfully to recover by doing a "Driver Rollback", Boot to
Last known Good configuration" and by using XP's Restore function. I have
tried several of the recent restore points but just end up each time stuck
back at the partial Welcome Screen.



I'm kind of assuming that blowing on the running MB caused some sort of
major Windows file corruption. ??



Does anyone have any ideas of what happened or how I can fix the problem?



I am thinking of trying to install a second alternate copy of XP on the
drive.... I believe if I just try to install XP on the drive it will give
me an option of an alternative load. ?
 
Coincidence. There's no way blowing on the motherboard can corrupt windows
files. Fans blow on the mother board and processor all the time. Maybe
something on the mb could short if you touched it or spit on it, but that
would be a hardware prob, not a windows user account booting problem. I
would remove all the networks cards in device manager via safe mode, pick
one card, put it in and do a repair install of xp.
 
There are no network cards in the computer but it still it won't let me
remove any of the network cards listed in Device manager while I am in safe
mode. That's the first thing I tried.

My friend blew on the works a whole lot harder than any fan ever did. Maybe
they caused some kind of static dishcharge or spit caused some short but if
that was the case, you'd think the machine would not be accessible via Safe
Mode either.

When you say a repair install, do you mean installing a second copy of XP on
the machine by means of typing R after restarting to the XP Recovery Console
?
 
If you have an xp cd, then you can do a repair install. It basicly loads xp
ontop of itself fixing anything that is wrong and leaving all your files,
etc...
Boot from the XP cd, and when prompted hit enter to begin setup. Press F8 to
accept the license agreement. It will then search and find your existing XP
install. Select it, and choose R for repair. Back up any important data
files in case something goes wrong.
 
Back
Top