Member Avatar for ButchDog

Hi all.
I'm new to this service.
Happy to be here. Hope you can help me.

I was cleaning up my win2k box.
Disabled un-needed services.
Used disk cleaner to get rid of old files.
Ran Pareto Spyware and RegCure.
I think that the last thing I did was defrag.
When the box booted it booted to a black screen with a rapidly flashing cursor in upper left corner of screen.
I popped in the win2k install disk and ran the repair windows routine.
I checked the drive, checked the files, installed files, then went to the finished screen that said windows would start in x seconds.
It did. It rebooted back to the same black screen.
I ran my trusty MadBoot disk and I can see the files on the hd in Norton Commander so I think that the file system is ok. I ran a hd utility and it appears that the hd is ok (Win2k repair checks that too, right?).
I found a utility somewhere that tried to repair the boot sector but that didn't work either.
Any ideas what's wrong?
Can this install of the os be fixed or do I have to extract needed personal files and reinstall?
Thanks, in advance, to all.
Butch

  • 2 Contributors
  • 5 Replies
  • 177 Views
  • 12 Hours Discussion Span
  • Latest Post Latest Post by DenisOxon
Member Avatar for DenisOxon

It sounds as video drivers are wrong for your card. So have you booted in Safe mode ?

Then you can reinstall video drivers and hopefully everything will work again.

Denis

Member Avatar for ButchDog

It sounds as video drivers are wrong for your card. So have you booted in Safe mode ?

Nope. Can't boot at all. The system does the POST where it tests the ram etc. then goes to the black screen and flashing cursor.

Member Avatar for DenisOxon

So when you run your Windows install and Madboot disk does screen work ok ?


Denis

Member Avatar for ButchDog

So when you run your Windows install and Madboot disk does screen work ok ?
Denis

Yes, it does. I boot with either the win2k install disk or MadBoot and it works perfectly. I can navigate around the Madboot disk and use all of the tools, no problem. I can use win2k repair and it works fine.
I've used the win2k repair utility before with good results. It's so weird that it will seemingly repair just fine but not boot up.
Butch

Member Avatar for DenisOxon

I had a similar Xp machine recently and problem was caused by a bad file.

I put disk in another PC as second disk, when PC booted it ran checkdisk and repaired files. As it happens disk is still in PC because we wanted to move data anyway.

Might be worth a try ? Unless you can run checkdsk off one of your boot up disks ?

Denis

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.