XP freezes during BIOS to OS switch

I have a serious problem.... my brother was using my computer a few days ago and he bumped it with his knee when he got out of the chair. The computer restarted and now it freezes when I get to the screen where you have the choices of loading the OS, going into safe mode, or the other options.

I cannot boot into safe mode, it freezes as soon as I hit enter..... same thing with the XP cd, it says "analyzing system config." or something like that and freezes.

The really weird thing is that it boots fine when I put it in my little bro's computer, it just won't boot in mine.

I'm almost leaning towards a motherboard problem b/c it's freezing in between BIOS and the OS, but I'm not sure. What do you guy's think?

BTW, this is mtb856... I'm using enduro's computer at the moment.

System specs are:

P4 2.4C @ 3.4
MSI Neo2-PFS
Windows XP Pro SP2 (I've had SP2 for several weeks, so it's not that AFAIK)


Thanks guys

How hard was this bump? I'm sure youve checked all the connections, but it sounds to me like a bad OC. Is it OC'ed right now? If it is try default, if not, I guess I'll leave to someone else.

Check the memory - usually a problem during bootup is memory, or cpu, related - might check the CPU HSF also.

Sorry my brother posted under my screenname accidentally. But I bumped his computer, so I can explain what happened. I bumped it while online, it just rocked back once, and then settled, but the screen colored up for 1 sec, and then the computer restarted. I'll tell him to reseat the memory though. He's reseated the HS all ready.

Any alarms/beeps from the motherboard?

Nope. It will reach the screen where you have a choice between two partitions (if you have them) and then it will countdown and freeze at 0. It seems to have a problem booting up into Windows. Although, it can't be the hdd really, and it isn't the vidcard obviously.

meatball was asleep, so I woke him up to tell him to reinstall his ram but he didn't want to. I wonder why. Anyway, past the part about me being a mean brother. I guess that narrows it down to the ram or the motherboard. If it was the motherboard or ram, he was going to upgrade those soon anyway, so no big loss there. He has ram on the way, and a new mobo is needed anyway, just so he can ditch the MSI :shudder: After seeing his board, I'm never getting an MSI.

Okay guys, it turned out to be the ram that was the problem. I switched DIMMs and it booted up fine..... thanks matt


-Meatball

No problem, at least it was only memory and not something serious.

At least it wasn't anything serious....... At least it wasn't anything at all. I was going to pay half for whatever I "broke" I'm safe now though.

At least it wasn't anything serious....... At least it wasn't anything at all. I was going to pay half for whatever I "broke" I'm safe now though.

Click to expand...

Yeah, we originally thought that my HDD had failed, so I had a Hitachi 80gig 7200rpm SATA drive lined up at Newegg, now I guess I don't need it ....... it would have been a nice price since enduro had to pay half