Win2000 Pro - UGLY boot error, need help!

[Zeke009]

I have a Windows 2000 Professional installation that has gone nuts on me! When you power the machine up, it POSTS ok and everything, but once the splash screen completes (the little progress bar) the system reboots! This is a never ending loop! It worked before lunch, come back and the machine has gone nuts!

Can someone please tell me how to fix this and/or what caused it? I can get to the recovery console, but thats it... not sure what to do in the recovery console since I have no idea what is wrong.

[Zeke009]

I just tried a few other things on that crazy Win2000... I can not even boot in Safe Mode, VGA Mode, or with Last Known Good. I could get to the Recovery Console, but like I said above. What will I do when I get there since I have no clue what the deal is.

Did I mention that this is the bosses new 1Ghz IBM machine? :eek: :eek:

[RedDeathDrinker]

Try clearing your CMOS (small jumper near the CMOS battery on your mobo). Three pins, 1,2 and 3. Jumper is over 1 and 2, shift it to 2 and 3 for a few seconds and replace to 1 and 2....

That will reset your BIOS to default configuration, and it should boot.

If not, come back and let us know more.........

[Zeke009]

I will try that, but I don't see how that will help. Don't get me wrong, I am grateful for the help! But the machine was working like a champ this morning and then after lunch it has become haunted!

[Fiz]

Boot from the floppy disks and do a repair, I had the same prob and did this and all is well. When you get into Windows you can disable the automatic reboot option. The only downside is that when you get a stop error that the comp just sits there, you have to reset it or cold boot it.

Fiz

[Zeke009]

Boot floppies, what a novel idea... here at work we have our imaging servers with images for the numerous pc's we have here. All I did was pull the harddrive and piggy-back it on a machine running Diskeeper Workstation 6. Set it for a boot time checkdisk and defrag and it found numerous errors on the harddrive.

From what the boot time screen is showing this hard drive just got whacked upside the head something fierce! I know a machine can go bad on you with little warning, but the boss man says nothing odd had been happening at all today. Worked great this morning, went to lunch and it wasn't working.

[muddocktor]

You said it's an IBM machine? That probably is the answer to why the hard drive is going bad; it's probably an IBM 75GXP hard drive. I have 1 of those I'm RMA'ing right now and it's only a year old, it decided to go belly-up for no good reason. Anyway, good luck with it.

[Zeke009]

I tried to piggy back the HD into another machine and analyze the drive with Diskeeper Workstation 6 and it would never complete. So, with that HD still piggy backed on another machine I set Diskeeper to do a boot time checkdisk and boot time defrag (this took about 4 hours to complete!). Instantly I was greeted with errors of corrupt index's and files not being referenced correctly. Not sure why or how this happened, but there is a happy ending! My boss's machine booted to a Login when I put the HD back in his IBM machine this morning and he was able to login and has not mentioned anything about missing files or "strange" behavior of his machine.

Our enviroment here is strictly NTFS and either NT4 or Win2000 Pro with Diskeeper 5 or 6 loaded on all machines. There are a few Diskeeper 4's running around still.

[Zeke009]

Originally posted by muddocktor
You said it's an IBM machine? That probably is the answer to why the hard drive is going bad; it's probably an IBM 75GXP hard drive. I have 1 of those I'm RMA'ing right now and it's only a year old, it decided to go belly-up for no good reason. Anyway, good luck with it.

I have mentioned this to him... we are going to hold off on any RMA for right now. We have a few of these new Black case 1Ghz IBM machines on our campus. So far it has been 50/50 rate of good vs bad machines. That is not good, but the powers to be want to wait for definitive results before we go ahead with replacing and canceling orders.
In our work enviroment, I have to give the tiny Compaq form factors the thumbs up here. Not as many issues as the few blackbox IBM's we have here.