Cannot boot into XP

[Dawgdoc]

Having a real issue with one of my work computers.

One day, I was no longer able to boot into Windows XP.

The computer POSTs properly, shows my RAID 0 properly, and starts to boot into windows by showing the Windows XP logo, and then it reboots (no powerdown but it goes blackscreen) and starts with the POST screen again.

Ive connected the drives to another computer and all of the data is there. I have also managed to copy a reasonable amount of my data but not all of it.

Ive done a windows recovery and tried "fixboot" "fixmbr" as well as "chkdsk /p" and still no success.

I keep getting the same reboot every single time.

Any suggestions? Im completely lost at this point.

EDIT: System specs

P5K Dlx
X3220 G0
2 X Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 perps in RAID 0
2 x 1 GB generic PC8500 DDR2
8800 GTX
Corsair HX520X
Windows XP SP3

 

[TempliNocturnus]

First, get a bootable copy of Seatools, or some other hard drive diagnostic utility (chkdsk is NOT a hard drive diagnostic utility). Run a short DST, on both drives, and see if either of them fail. If it fails, you need a new hard drive.

If the drive passes the DST, obtain a WinPE/BartPE/ERDCommander disk.

Boot from one of those and if you can view the files on the volume (meaning your array is still intact), do a chkdsk c: /f (never heard of /p). If it doesn't fix anything, try restoring the hive files from a snapshot. There's KB article on how to do that right here

 

[Dawgdoc]

Thx for the response and the info.

As I said though, the files are there and not corrupted. I have copied many/most of them to an external hard drive and can see/view the entire contents of the drive when I hooked up the array to another computer.

When I boot the RAID screen after the initial POST screen shows the array as intact, and functioning properly.

Still feel It is recommended to use the Seatools utility?

FYI more info no chkdsk /p here :
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/.../proddocs/en-us/bootcons_chkdsk.mspx?mfr=true

Good link on the KB article. Gonna read up on it later and see what I can do to recover the rest of the stuff I havnt thought about yet off those disks.

Also, Im not interested in salvaging a hard drive, and dont care if I need to throw one away. I have already rebuilt the work computer and gotten it up and running (new OS install/etc) but I just want to be able to boot into windows from this RAID array that is giving me issues so I can retrieve all of my data and do a true backup. I have a lot of my basic files (documents, QB backup, yada yada) but there are a ton of other things that I would like to backup that I wouldnt know how/where to navigate to in order to get and would like to do so through the main windows program (email contact, all email history, favs from firefox, saved passwords, blah blah blah)

 

[TempliNocturnus]

While there's a good chance your array would be broken if one of your drives become faulty, I'd still suggest running the DST. I have seen Windows XP attempt to load, then immediately reboot, and most of the time I found the drive to be faulty.

It could be a driver and you could have Automatic Restart checked in your system properties and you could just not be noticing the BSOD that is displayed briefly prior to reboot. You can see if you can boot into safemode, but I personally prefer to determine whether or not the drive I'm working on is physically damaged before I try to dig deeper.

The end result, assuming both your drives turn out to be healthy, will probably require you to install XP again on the existing file system, which will keep your data intact.

Oh yeah, one more thing I might have overlooked: Go into your BIOS and see what mode your SATA controller is set to. You may have to change it from ATA/IDE/legacy to AHCI or vica-versa. However, if it worked before and you don't have any reason to think that you or someone else went into the BIOS and changed things or reset it to defaults, this shouldn't be the problem.

 

[shadowdr]

There was an XP reboot loop problem that surfaced around SP2. I can't remember exactly what it was about but I do remember using Barts PE disk that had an XP reboot loop fix that was on the disk. It seems like it has to do with the userinit.exe file that may be removed by virus software or perhaps virus software is emulating a virus. I think that Bart's PE has a command line that replaces that file in the system32 folder where it belongs. Since you can acess the files on another computer check that the file is in fact there and not missing or corrupt.