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Tom Schindler

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Machine, home built Athlon64. 512 MB RAM, 80 GB EIDE ATA-100 HDD.



Machine has been rock solid for the past 2 years or so.



Last night, the machine self restarted. It is in a continuous loop. Boots up, startes to load windows, restarts and does everything over again.



I think it has something do do with the last update since I had it set for automatic updates.



I was able to change the start-up setting to disable the "restart if system failure". I get the error of the following...



"Stop: c0000221 {Bad Image Checksum}"

"The Image apphelp.dll is possibly corrupt. The header checksum does not match th

e computed checksum"



Any ideas what we can do to get the machine back running?





Tom
 
Can you boot in regular mode or safe mode and Go back 2 days on the system restore ???



Todd Z
 
Nope. Will not go into safe mode. Already tried that. Even tried "Last known good configuration". Wouldn't start either.





Tom
 
I am out, that is normally what I do, Hopefully some one will chime in...



Todd Z
 
I had that problem last year. Gets to "Loading Windows" and reboots. Never figured it out; took the HD out and hooked it to a Linux machine, got my important stuff, and re-formatted and re-installed Windows. Hasn't been a problem in over a year.



Sorry I'm no help though.
 
If it won't even boot into safe mode I think your HD may be bad. Take the HD out and put in another machine (as a slave drive) and see if you can access it.
 
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How many dimms of ram do you have installed?



My first reaction is either of two things:



One being the Ram. If you have more then one installed, try and take one out. If the problem persists, then swap one for the other. If the error comes up again, try and find someone else's ram and switch again.



The second is a possible Hard Drive failure. It still might be recoverable, but not able to be a bootable drive anymore.



If its not those two things, then I found this:



http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;326687&Product=winxp



Google every key word you are getting during you error messages. I will try and search more for you later today. Right now I have to go training. Good luck.
 
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It is possible the drive is bad. You can test it with DFT (Disk Fitness Test) which is a downloadable bootable cd. (link below)





If the drive passes (green code screen at the end of the test) you can try to use the recovery console of windows and run chkdsk /r and /p that will alot of times fix boot loops.

 
I was going to try to just boot to CD, and copy a new file in its place, unfortunatly, the partition is NTFS.



Any ideas if there is any way I can do this with NTFS?





Tom
 
As JD said, you can run a disk diag to verify the HDD is good. I'd recommend using one from the vendor (ie. Western Digital, Seagate, etc). After that, you can access the recovery console booting from the Windows cd. Try the following commands to fix your boot.ini and boot record.



fixmbr

fixboot

chkdsk (as listed above)



If this doesn't work, try making sure your memory is good. Memtest is what I use and a great tool to have. - http://www.memtest.org/



If everything checks out, backup your data and reinstall windows, or install windows into another directory ie. c:\windows001 and see if it boots.

 
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Brother-in-law had this problem in December. Restored XP using OEM CD and it was fine until we shut it off. Same problem again. Only way to fix was to reformat HD and reload XP and everything else. They were not keeping firewall and security protections updated. Don't know what the rogue program was, but it was one that destroys the boot sector on the HD so that XP can never boot-up.
 
There was a virus last year that made XP, do the exact problem your having..cant recall the name or the fix...
 
Same problem on my old system. Took it to a computer place and they had it for 2 months and couldn't figure it out. Reformated and re-installed XP and is fine still to this day. (someone else has it now since we got a new one during the first week it went down, thus the reason we let the place have it till they could figure it out.):D;)
 
A friend just dropped off an XP laptop with a similar problem...would boot, past the XP logo screen with the status bar, then to the black screen with mouse pointer, then at the point it should chime and paint the colored desktop it would just churn on the hard drive...the desktop never comes up...the mouse is responsive, but just a black screen, mouse ptr, and HDD activity...for hours!



Ran CHKDSK from the XP recovery window...still no good.



This friend had a lot of data on the drive they didn't want to lose. I told her that I didn't have the equipment to try to save her data (I just invested in a laptop HDD enclosure)...



Pretty much I didn't want to be her recovery service so I told her to come and pick it up, and to call Dell and to try to have them recover everything.



Tom
 
When a computer continues to reboot, it is usually a heat problem.



Shut off the PC for a day, or at least a few hours to let it cool. If it boots up and runs for a little while and then starts rebooting after it warms up 10-20 minutes, then you probably have a bad CPU fan.



My AMD did the same thing. I took the cover when I booted it cold and it ran fine for about 15 minutes unitl I noticed the CPU fan was running irratically, stopping, jerking and acting like the bearing were about to seize. I replace the CPU fan and the computer runs like a champ. I left it running for a whole week without shutting it off and it continued to run flawlessly.



...Rich
 
I was going to mention what RichardL said. It sounds like this machine is on all the time. If so the CPU fan might have gone out and the CPU is too hot. I just had a video card go out the same way. It was behaving strange and then just stopped working. Turned out the fan was seized and it was HOT!



I would try booting a "LiveCD" like Knoppix or something. Since it does not use the HD, you can eliminate that as the source of trouble if you still have a problem booting a CD.

 
What is the Network connection on this PC? Is it thru an ethernet cable? Or a USB Wireless Adapter?



I had an issue with some clients that had a DLINK USB Wireless adapter. The issue was the Device driver was causing the issue... If you unplugged the USB Device the system would stop lopping on Startup...



Let me know if this might be part of your situation... Try Disconnecting any USB Devices and Boot again see what happens...



Cheers

Whit
 
Now I know mine didn't run all the time. We would turn it off when we were done with it every time. Ran fine one minute and then started doing it the next time it turned on. And my "automatic updates" was turned off, so it didn't download any update before it happened. The "overheating" and fan was the first thing the computer place looked at, because that was what they figured also.;)
 
you can try resetting the bios, also it could be your video card has failed, or the fan isint working on eihter the video card or the processor, sum computers have a saftly buil in for that. if you can acces your bios (usualy by hitting F8 during startup) u can check the temp on sum of them.



Justin
 

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