XP Pro won't start

[Oli]

Windows XP Pro has crashed and fails to start. It gets to the Windows
screen and the progress bar just keeps going - nowhere.

The disk access light is on full-time. Jusst prior to this everything
seemed to be really slow.

Trying to start in safe mode, safe with dos, or sfae with networking
shows that it hangs when loading

C:\windows\system32\drivers\btkrnl.sys

Using start with boot logging has no effect.

Unplugging my Logitech BT combo has no effect.

I think it had just downloaded and installed a Windows update. This
update had failed to install and just kept on downloading

and the Windows help people had suggested trying to run some command
like "oc qc system=" plus some other stuff. This seemed

to get the update to install but now I wish it hadn't!

I can't get in to see what the email said!

Help!

Cheers

 

[Steven L Umbach]

Try selecting the option for last known good configuration in the alternate
boot menu to see if that helps. --- Steve

 

[Oli]

Yeah that doesn't help the same problem occurs.
We managed to get back into windows just by waiting - it took about
half an hour!
Have tried:
Mem test - all ok
AV scan - left running but rebooted itself!?
Disk access seems really slow
Used MSConfig to boot in diagnostic mode, however disk access was still
really slow
Tried to boot from windows CD to do repair install however the CD did
recognise any of the hard drives, we have 2 SATA 200gb Seagate drive in
a Raid 1 (mirrored) array.
Am currently running chkdsk but it has taken 2 hours to do 14%!! Do you
think this is a driveer problem or a hardware problem?

Cheers,
Oli

 

[Steven L Umbach]

CheckDisk can take a long time particularly on large hard drives and if you
are doing the surface test. I would also look in the system and application
logs via Event Viewer to see if anything helpful is reported there and use
Task Manager to see if a process is taking up all the CPU [other than system
idle]. Also check Device Manager to see if any problems are shown. Try
using msconfig and do a selective startup and disable startup applications
and system services to see if that helps or not. If it does you have some
service or application that is not disabled by Safe Mode that is causing the
problem. Since you indicate this may be related to a security update you can
go into Add and Remove Programs and uninstall the latest updates shown in
the list with an installation date. --- Steve