Startup-Error

( also known as: XP won't boot up, boot failure)

Windows Startup-Error include "text" screens, that you may see such as the following:

This screen is "affectionately" know as the "Blue Screen of Death", and indicates a serious problem for Window or hardware failure. Causes can be from bad hardware, or bad "drivers" (software that comes with hardware to make it work with Windows), or catastrophic Windows failure. This paticularlar message was cause by a bad video driver.

This next screen comes from a hard drive failure. This can be a hard drive hardware failure, or from a Windows corruption problem of the boot sectors, etc. Even if I find that a reload is necessary to fix this, I will run diagnostics on the hard drive to see if the hard drive checks out.

The commonality of these Windows Startup-Error, is that they occur instead of the normal XP "Splash Screen" that you normally see at start-up (below).

These text screens can come from a variety of failures, such as Bad Hard Drive, Badly corrupted Windows Software Load, etc.

These failures are usually "catastophic" and will normally require technical expertise to solve.

You obviously have power, but something very fundamental is missing.

However, you could check the following:

1. Do you have a floppy disk in your A drive? Sometimes the PC is trying to boot from the floppy! Take the floppy out, and try to boot again!

2. Do you have a CD in your CD Drive? Your PC will sometimes try to load from that! Also, you may have Flash Drive in your USB connections.

3.Try to start up in Safe Mode or "Last Known Good Configuration". If you can start up in Safe Mode, then you may have a defective video driver, and PC is otherwise OK. Go to XP Drivers
for more info.
4.go to XP Safe Mode
5. Attempt to System Restore