problem booting crusty old windows XP
- by Carson Myers
I have an acer aspire laptop running Windows XP home.
I believe I have some virus on it, I'm not sure--I mostly just run linux in a VM on it so I wasn't too worried. I'm not sure if that virus caused this problem.
The laptop wasn't recognizing my USB hard drive for some reason so I decided to restart it. When it started up, it got past the memory test, past the boot screen, (but it paused right here on a blank screen for awhile) and flashed the desktop once (like it does just before the login screen) and then crashed. I got a quick BSOD and then it restarted. Then it tried to boot again, etc etc infinite loop of failure.
Well, before trying safe mode, I disabled automatic restart on system crash so I could read the blue screen. There wasn't anything important on it, it said
*** STOP: 0x00000000 (0xC0000000 0x,.... )
beginning physical memory dump
physical memory dump complete
That's not verbatim (obviously) but it didn't help me.
so I booted in safe mode, and it stopped on the driver gagp30kx.sys and then restarted (and infinite loop of failure again).
I burned a recovery CD and tried that. It loaded it, and I went into repair mode. I ran chkdsk and then disabled the AGP driver. Same thing on booting in safe mode except it stopped at mup.sys instead.
I enabled the AGP driver again, and ran chkdsk again from the CD. It said it found problems but didn't say it fixed them. So I ran it a second time, and it said "performing additional checking or recovery" lots of times (I can't tell how many, they went above the screen top). I tried booting again and no luck.
Every time I run chkdsk after trying to boot again it says it found and fixed more errors.
I think it might be whatever driver is after the AGP driver, but I don't know what it is or how to find out.
Can anyone help me fix this?