Hello everyone, I've got a big prob with Win XP. As I was logging in XP appeared to freeze. Although I could move the cursor with my mouse, no programmes appeared to start. After a while I switched of the PC with the power-on/off button and switched it on again. XP does not even start now!! the XP loading screen appears and the blue bar appears to load , but I then get a screen with 4 options: 1)Start in safe mode; 2)safe mode command prompt; 3)start XP with last (functioning) settings; 4)Start XP as normal. The first 3 options result in the Computer restarting automatically. Option 4 ends up wrighting loads of stuff on screen (file names and some other stuff) then freezing. If I have to reinstall everything, does that mean I will lose all my files (word, excel, mp3, etc)? If yes,would there be anyway to preserve these files before reinstalling? Anybody know what I con do? Any help would be appreciated!!! Rak

Rak: If you have to reinstall the operating system, do a non-destructive recovery. Only the system files themselves will be reinstalled; your personal files will be preserved. Solarian

Hope you can sort things out without reinstalling, but if not, check link below. Important: only for OEM Windows XP LINK Solarian

Thanx for the quick reply Solarian. I haven't tried to do anything yet, but I'm already a bit lost so bear with me. I can get to any kind of DOS/command prompt so should I just put my Win XP Pro CD in to my PC and switch it on? Will it give me the option to do a non destructive reinstall when my PC detects the CD? Is it possible that I downloaded some kind of Virus/Trojan which caused this problem and will reinstall detect and delete/overwrite this. Thanks again, Iceberg.

Iceberg: Having an OEM version of XP myself, here is where I must stop and let someone else pick up the thread. For me, my backup exists on another petition within the hard drive; the PC came with no CD. My experience lies with OEM. I do know that the CD version of XP eventually leads to a Recovery Console. As to what steps you'd take once there for a non-destructive recovery, I can't say. While waiting for someone to pick up this thread, you could go to www.microsoft.com and look through their Knowledge Base. It's quite extensive and probably contains several references to your problem. Best of luck, Solarian

put the cd in your drive. Run the command prompt. type (the letter of the drive the disk is in):\Setup intall it non distructive. If you do a distructive install it will format your hard drive first and you'll loose everything. You probably got some kind of virus and it corrupted some main windows files. If somehow the problem isn't fixed, sorry but you're gonna have to format it, reinstall windows, and loose everything.

windows starts up fine with safe mode but when I go into normal mode the screen is blank,I can still hear it loading,but after the windows xp pro loading screen,where the option to select a user and everything after is blank.Can you help me please?