My computer locks up and won't boot. What do I do?

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Hi Leo. My son's computer has been periodically locking up on some games, and then won't boot. We get the Aware beeps that the BIOS can't find the video card beeps, but can't get past the flash to black screen to do anything. I have tried Control-alt-delete to end task and shut the system down, unplugging the CPU and letting it sit for a minute before plugging it back in...that kind of thing. What do I do now? Thanks for all the help. d

It sounds like the game is causing the video card to go into some irrecoverable state. I would look for updated drivers from the video card manufacturer and see if that doesn't help.

hi
my comp won't boot it shows a blue screen after windows logo & that's all nothing it does after that . No bootin takes place even from the cd after that what should i do .? do u know what is the problem is a wild ram problem or some thing like that? plz help me soon

It could be so many things. I'd follow the steps in the article.

Hi Leo,

I'm really hoping you can save my PC! I've read through this post and also the Lsass.exe post, but can't find the solution in either location.

I am running XP Pro w/ SP2, and all of a sudden, today it won't boot up. If I don't put an XP CD in, it will boot all the way (from the hard drive) until it gets the Lsass.exe object not found error message with the 'OK' dialog box. Clicking 'OK' will cause a reboot. I tried to boot into safe mode, but after successfully selecting that option, it will hang before it boots successfully. (it hangs while the text based 'progress bar' is less than half way through). Booting into safe mode with command prompt will hang when the progress bar just completes. Choosing the boot into last known config will cause a reboot before it even finishes booting. so none of the advanced windows options seem to work.

Since I have my XP installation CD, I have also tried to boot from the CD. I was really hoping that I can do a repair install, and it starts out normally by deleting a bunch of files, and then generating a list of files to be copied. However, in the middle of copying the necessary files (~48% done) it stops being able to copy files. It asks you to check to make sure that the right CD is in the CD tray, etc. I have checked that my installation CD is not damaged (I successfully installed with the same CD on a different machine, except that I couldn't activate it of course). I have browsed the content of the CD and found the correct files (with the .XX_ extension, as well as a cabinet file) in the directory. So I'm pretty sure the CD is okay. Anyway, I hit 'Esc' to skip the file to be copied, but all subsequent files are also not 'copyable'. Hitting Esc repeatedly to attempt to skip all the files then causes the 'Windows is forced to shut down to prevent damage' screen.

I can get into the recovery console, but for some reason it won't recognize my administrator password, so I haven't been able to try salvaging things via command line. I have tried many combinations of my admin passwords to no avail.

I just want to boot into Windows ONCE so I can salvage some recent family pics from the last few months that I hadn't backed up yet.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

It sounds to me like perhaps you have a harddisk problem. Something's certainly broke - as you already know.

My temptation would be to boot from a stand-alone boot floppy (I believe bootdisk.com has 'em), or perhaps something like knoppix (stand-alone Linux on a CD). Both should at least be able to read your hard disk and get your pictures. Once you've recovered what information you want and can off that disk, I'd be tempted to reformat - perhaps even running GRC.com's SpinRite hard disk utility.

Ok, so my PC powers up, then nothing. The HD-led burns (green) for a while, after which it does absolutely and completely nothing. It cant be a POST problem, cause there are no beeps. I read elsewhere that it might be a +12v problem (too many devices connected to it), but when I disconnect some devices, it still wont boot.

Fyi: this problem started accuring when I flashed my motherboard BIOS to the latest version. I dont know how, but sometimes I do get it to boot (all the way into Windows), but after a while, it locks up again; anyway I flashed the BIOS back to its original version (I had saved the old BIOS), but it still keeps locking up and I have to unplug my ram and my videocard, leave them out for a while (1-2 hours) before I can successfully boot again.

So, any ideas on what is wrong (could it be some BIOS settings, cause I put most of them on auto/by spd/etc)?

Thanks for your reply in advance.

P.S.: Please note that my CPU temp is 72Celsius IDLE!!! (which is NOT good, I know, dont know what to do about it though).

Comment on my previous posts:
Installed a different heatsink+fan (+arctic silver5 thermal compound) which lowered my CPU temp down to 38c idle. The problem still remains though.

Because I've tried to disconnect multiple devices and replace my videocard and RAM (have an old vid-card and RAM that previously worked on the exact same PC config I'm running now), I think the problem's source is the motherboard: I'd forgotten that I previously flashed my videocard (using atiflash).

Also: recently I have encountered the following error messages: "..BIOS checksum error.." and: "..X800 XT.." (the last is the name of the vid-card I flashed, I actually have a regular X800 Pro installed).

So I'm now planning to flash my vid-card back to the original bios which I saved on floppy (IF i can get trough POST) and if that doesn't work, buy a new motherboard. What do you think?

Sounds like you either need to scan for spyware:
http://ask-leo.com/spyware_how_do_i_remove_and_avoid_spyware.html

or run the system file checker:
http://ask-leo.com/what_is_the_system_file_checker_and_how_do_i_run_it.html

or both.

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