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.

I'm trying to do a repair install of XP Pro SP3 on someone's machine but for some reason the keyboard and mouse stop responding during the "installing devices" phase of the setup, which is awesome because shortly after this happens it asks me to locate the ATI drivers. The keyboard and mouse are both USB and this little Acer box doesn't have any PS/2 ports. Didn't see any "legacy USB" option in the BIOS...

I'm fixing a laptop for someone and every time I try to navigate to a page, the network connections box pops up and asks what I want to connect to, even though I'm already online. It often pops up several times before loading the next page, so I have to keep hitting the cancel button. I'm not sure if it's happening because I installed a PCMCIA wireless card for the guy or if it was an existing problem, but I'd like to take care of it before I give the machine back.

Fixing a laptop that apparently fell off a couch. Initially wouldn't boot from anything (hard drives, optical, USB) until the BIOS was reset. Running 64-bit Vista, gets stuck at a black screen with a mouse cursor, even in safe mode. Startup repair finds no problems. I've seen a few Vista boxes hang at this screen, but this computer is flat out STUCK. The weird part is that there seems to be somewhat consistent hard drive activity.

Connected the drive to our tech machine and removed a few viruses with Microsoft Security Essentials. Put it back in the laptop and it's booting fine now.

Running CHKDSK was the first thing I did after the drive passed the SeaTools long test. If I remember correctly, that got it out of the reboot cycle but then it just hung at "Loading PBR for descriptor" (it had this error before, but it was hard to read because it flashed quickly on the screen, then the NTLDR error and rebooted). The machine is a Dell Inspiron 600m, and it appears Microsoft Security Essentials found something malicious on the drive, but I'm still waiting for the scan to complete.

Here are the PBR and MBR images. Hope I did this right. Thanks. BootSector_DriveK.dat.gz MBR_HardDisk4.dat.gz

That was one of my initial thoughts, but I checked it out with GParted and FDISK and the Windows partition is definitely set as active. I'm also considering the possibility of a boot sector virus. I scanned the drive with HDHacker and (after some garbage characters) it said "A disk read error occurred...NTLDR is missing...NTLDR is compressed...Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart"

Someone brought a laptop to the computer repair shop I work at, and initially the problem was that it was stuck in a reboot cycle regarding a PBR error and "NTLDR not found". The hard drive passed the SeaTools long test and I ran a filesystem check from the OS disc. After that, it hung at "loading PBR for descriptor" so I tried running FIXMBR, FIXBOOT and then did a repair install because it just hung with a blinking cursor. Even after another repair install and trying FIXMBR/FIXBOOT again, it still just hangs at a black screen with a blinking cursor.

I booted Ubuntu from a live CD and found the APXIO file in the C:\ directory. Removing it has solved the problem, and hopefully there won't be any side effects down the road. I believe the problem was caused by him enabling drive compression and canceling it partway through.

Just spent the past week fixing my friend's laptop, upgraded from Vista to Win7 and everything was working smoothly. He installed some updates and now is getting a startup error about some APXIO file. Tried to do a startup repair from the install CD, but it didn't find any problems.

I work at a computer repair shop and I've been tearing my hair out trying to get this one machine to update. Most updates will install, but there are two DotNet and ActiveX related updates (KB982525 and KB980195) that continue to fail. I've tried re-installing DotNet 3.5 as well as flushing the software distribution, but no dice. When this happens on XP, I can usually take care of it with Dial-A-Fix, which unfortunately isn't Vista-compatible.

Apparently WinXP Home doesn't allow me to use the Local Users and Groups snapin.

I work at a computer repair shop and a customer brought in a machine asking us to make one of the accounts limited, but for some reason it doesn't show up in User Accounts. It showed up in the alternate User Accounts (control userpasswords2) but it wouldn't let me change the account type so I decided to delete and re-create it, however after deleting the account it gave me an error saying the account already exists even though it now doesn't show up in either User Accounts controls. Oddly enough, I can still login as that user and User Accounts describes it as a "guest account" but it's not the usual guest account that comes with XP. I can't add a password or change the picture and it only shows up in User Accounts when I'm logged in as this phantom user.

I would like to attempt installing Windows 7 OEM (Dell) without using a disc or USB key. Could it be done by mounting the Win7 ISO with something like Daemon Tools or copying it to a partition?