kahlil88

Trying to do a repair install on a Dell laptop with WinXP Home. The optical drive is somewhat buggy, so I had to keep swapping various XP SP3 (Home and Pro) discs to get the first phase (from the disc, with the blue screen) to finish. Then it reboots and seems to be trying to boot the OS rather than the setup program. It displays the Windows logo boot screen briefly then just hangs at a black screen -- no hard drive activity. I'd like to either cancel setup, since a repair may not even be necessary, or get it to finish somehow. It has a normal boot.ini which is another thing that leads me to wonder if it's even trying to repair install.

Nothing in the BIOS, nothing new with hidden devices shown. PartedMagic doesn't see any audio devices, I guess it's a hardware problem.

Unfortunately nothing shows up in safe mode -- no audio or modem devices, no unknown devices either. Makes it all the more difficult to fix. Might just try a repair install, though I'm not very confident that will work either...

I'm trying to fix a friend's Inspiron 6000 laptop, which is having some driver issues. The sound card isn't working but doesn't show up in the device manager (not even as an "unknown device") and neither does the modem. It sounds like the problem started when he installed a bunch of drivers from Dell. The first thing I did was uninstall the audio drivers, but re-installing fails because it doesn't detect the sound device. Nothing in the device manager, although DriverDetective sees the modem (it expired though, and won't cooperate). Scanned the registry with CCleaner and ran system file checker. Any ideas before I resort to attempting a repair install?

Apparently this problem is sometimes caused by bad fonts, but I don't really want to go randomly deleting fonts hoping this problem will go away. Repair install didn't fix it, updated the video driver, removed the .NET frameworks again and ran WSUS Offline Update...really running out of ideas.

Trying to repair install an XP system that's been giving lsass.exe errors, but during the second phase of the install (rebooting after the blue screen phase) it immediately pops up with an lsass "object name not found" error and restarts. I thought about replacing it with the file on the setup disc, but an md5sum revealed they were identical. I can't run system file checker (sfc) from recovery console or a special XP live CD, but maybe that wouldn't help anyway.

Installed the security update with overwrite option but I'm still getting gdiplus.dll crashes. Going to resume re-installing the .NET stuff. Are you certain it's not related? As far as I can tell, the only programs that seem to crash are dependent on .NET

Trying to fix my mom's laptop. The problem started with Microsoft Security Essentials crashing (never once saw the main window) and the error report revealed it was because of gdiplus.dll (which is part of DotNet last time I checked, please correct if I'm mistaken). I've tried re-registering the DLL (regsvr32 gdiplus.dll) but it gives me an error (...was loaded, but the DllRegisterServer entry point was not found). I ran system file checker twice, completely uninstalled .Net v2.0/3.5/4.0 and rebooted. Now in the process of re-installing them all, starting with .NET v2 which didn't ask me to restart, and the test program still crashes (of course the details showed gdiplus.dll). Nothing shows up on Windows Update, even after flushing the cache with Dial-a-Fix. I'm at my wit's end and would like these crashes to stop.

My friend decided to enable drive compression and after a reboot, the thing won't start because bootmgr is compressed. I have tried booting from the Win7 disc and running startup repair, as well as manually running bootrec with the fixmbr, fixboot and rebuildbcd options, the latter of which reports "0 windows installations found" although all three operations report being completed successfully. I also tried the "load driver" option just so I could browse the filesystem and disable compression, but it still stops with the same error on every boot.

I'm doing some tech work for a local cafe with public computers. As it is, they're all running Antamedia Internet Cafe on WinXP Pro, and the public user account has limited privileges. The newest computer seems to be having some trouble running the software, unless I set the public account to be an administrator (which isn't the best idea as far as security is concerned). For the initial setup, I made it an admin just so I could disable any unwanted startup programs and ensure the firewall didn't block any web browsers or instant messengers. It's definitely not a firewall issue, as the problem still occurred when I temporarily disabled it and logged on as the public user.

Someone brought in a computer to the shop I work at. The system was behaving erratically, so we decided to try a repair install, but it hangs indefinitely at "removing any setup files used" with 1 minute remaining. Unfortunately, a hard reboot just brings us back to the beginning of the repair install. Is there any way to remove the setup files and get it to boot back into Windows? I should mention that I already looked at the boot.ini file and there isn't a setup entry, just the standard Windows XP.