I only say that with half praise because Windows should not be that easy to break in the first place!!!
We have almost all been there: the power cuts out, the surge protector trips, someone accidentally trips over the power cord, or you unplug the wrong cable. No matter how it happens, your Windows desktop gets shut off while it is up and running instead of being shutdown nicely. When you started the machine back up, it was done with incense, candles and a sacrificial goat in the hopes that your hard drive would be spared the wrath of the gods. Unfortunately for lots of us, we had no such luck and our fate was to have any number of ills ranging from hard disk failure to blue screens of death (BSODs) to my personal favourite, the never ending restart.
My friend Buckwheat's family computer suffered this last fate just recently after her young daughter that she was doing the right thing by turning the computer off after she was done playing on her Disney website. Sure enough, the computer refused to show the logon screen from then on and simply continued to reboot over and over again. I tried all my usual ticks of running the Windows recovery install, defragging and scannning the hard drive for errors on another machine, and checking for possible viruses. I kept running into a dead end. The next logical step would be to reinstall Windows (as I myself and DW have had to do numerous times in the past when we had catastrophic failures). However, while the personal data would remain intact on the inexplicably created D: drive of a split 40GB unit, the programs (some of which were installed for her by well meaning folks who did not leave a backup of the installer) would have to be reinstalled and some would be lost forever.
As the stubborn IT person, I refused to give up this time knowing the proper answer had to be out there somewhere. Well, I finally found it on a forum that had the links to a Microsoft Knowledgebase article from 2004. I surely wish I had found this years ago as it would have saved many a headache. In any case, I have it now and I base it on to you in the hopes it will help you, a friend or a family member if this same issue arises on their machine. Really, it is one of the simpler fixes that one could hope to have to perform and it took me all of ten minutes to have her system back up and running properly. If my posting it here will save but one of you, then the pain will have been worth it.
Oh yeah, one more thing. Google rules!!!
Ciao.
Windows XP logon screen does not appear and the computer continuously restarts
We have almost all been there: the power cuts out, the surge protector trips, someone accidentally trips over the power cord, or you unplug the wrong cable. No matter how it happens, your Windows desktop gets shut off while it is up and running instead of being shutdown nicely. When you started the machine back up, it was done with incense, candles and a sacrificial goat in the hopes that your hard drive would be spared the wrath of the gods. Unfortunately for lots of us, we had no such luck and our fate was to have any number of ills ranging from hard disk failure to blue screens of death (BSODs) to my personal favourite, the never ending restart.
My friend Buckwheat's family computer suffered this last fate just recently after her young daughter that she was doing the right thing by turning the computer off after she was done playing on her Disney website. Sure enough, the computer refused to show the logon screen from then on and simply continued to reboot over and over again. I tried all my usual ticks of running the Windows recovery install, defragging and scannning the hard drive for errors on another machine, and checking for possible viruses. I kept running into a dead end. The next logical step would be to reinstall Windows (as I myself and DW have had to do numerous times in the past when we had catastrophic failures). However, while the personal data would remain intact on the inexplicably created D: drive of a split 40GB unit, the programs (some of which were installed for her by well meaning folks who did not leave a backup of the installer) would have to be reinstalled and some would be lost forever.
As the stubborn IT person, I refused to give up this time knowing the proper answer had to be out there somewhere. Well, I finally found it on a forum that had the links to a Microsoft Knowledgebase article from 2004. I surely wish I had found this years ago as it would have saved many a headache. In any case, I have it now and I base it on to you in the hopes it will help you, a friend or a family member if this same issue arises on their machine. Really, it is one of the simpler fixes that one could hope to have to perform and it took me all of ten minutes to have her system back up and running properly. If my posting it here will save but one of you, then the pain will have been worth it.
Oh yeah, one more thing. Google rules!!!
Ciao.
Windows XP logon screen does not appear and the computer continuously restarts
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