Windows XP troubles..

Hello,

I need some help to get to safe mode in Windows XP. Currently my desktop boots but freezes right before it gets to the Windows XP boot screen. It goes through the part where the a gray progress bar but then it usually brings up the boot screen.

All this mess started couple days ago when I was working on vmware and suddenly I got a blue screen stating pagefault had occured and windows was shutdown to prevent damage. Since then I was experiencing random freezes while in Windows. These freezes were so fatal that it did not respond to ctrl-alt-del or anything. I simply had to reboot. So I thought I should replace the system files and do a upgrade. I popped in the windows xp cd (while in windows) and did an upgrade option. Everything installed OK. I even booted couple of times but then it just stopped working. I am unable to get to safe mode or anything. I tried using a boot disk to load the cd-rom drivers and then hopefully try to start up windows setup (to recover). But upon running the boot disk and starting the setup I got this error: "An internal setup error has occured. could not find a place for a swap file. setup cannot continue." I also tried using Microsoft's XP boot disk (6 boot disk). But on the third boot disk installation I got this error: "File setupreg.hiv could not be loaded. error code 4096." So as you can see I tired numerous approaches before coming on this forum to bug you guys. Please provide with any feedback.


Thank you
nutrageous

I think you can get into safe mode by pushing F8 right after the comp post.

Could try booting from the win xp cd and use the repair option..

Zomu said:

Could try booting from the win xp cd and use the repair option..

Click to expand...

Yup , or you can also do the "F8" button (before WinXP logo appears) as metioned and do "restore point" from safe mode (if you have any saved restore points saved) .

( Just a note :I have found the Microsoft XP "boot disks" never really work)


stereo555

Sounds like more of a memory problem to me. Can you try another stick of RAM, or if you have more than one, take one out and try again.

If you can boot to an A:\ prompt, you can run a program called---memtest 86 to check your memory array for errors.