Re: OT: PING: Meat Plow, and anyone else who knows Windows XP - ENTIRELY OFF-TOPIC

On 8 tammi, 13:49, Andy <n...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
IIRC, you seemed to know a bit about Windoze XP systems.   Dunno if
you've got any time to help me troubleshoot this ***, but I'm a bit
stumped as to what to try (being that it's not my machine).  I
understand fully if you couldn't be bothered, especially without being
able to see the machine yrself.

Anyway...
I'm currently trying to help my friend with her Toshiba laptop.  It's a
'Tecra S2' for what it's worth, running XP.

Basically, upon logging in XP loads as normal, brings up the
desktop/task bar etc, and then....

Nothing.

The mouse pointer still moves, but no clicks (left OR right) are
recognised.

No keystrokes seem to be recognised either.  Ctrl-Alt-Delete does
nothing.

Now, I've tried booting in safe mode and this produces a somewhat usable
system.  I can run msconfig.exe and have attempted rebooting after
disabling all startup items.  This seems to have no effect on the
problem though.  

This problem affects *both* user accounts, and the machine is
essentially unusable.

Attempting to boot using 'Last Known Good Configuration' has no effect
either.

If it's of any use, the last task completed on this machine was the
importing of a couple of albums worth of music into iTunes, which it did
without any troubles.

Now, I'm left wondering:

Is there anything in the way of a Disk repair/diagnostic utility as part
of the OS, eg the Windows equivalent of something like 'fsck'?

What other options should I try with msconfig?

FWIW, I'm happy enough running stuff from the command line too.

If you've got the time/energy to reply, ANY help is appreciated with
this one, I've really got no idea how both user accounts could be ruined
by simply rebooting.  

(I don't think I'll be able to convince her to install Linux either :-) )

Cheers,
Andy.

Well since it loads that far you know that it's gotta be a file
Windoze can't load and causes it to halt OR it's a faulty device
driver which causes it to jam. If it were a tabletop system I'd be
first checking if it's overclocked, though, or the displaycard
overclocked. Is there any way it could be overheating, an internal fad
dead? Hm. Probably not. Still, the fact it works in safe mode implies
a display card/peripheral problem. Try changing the resolution to VGA
or installing new display drivers in safe mode. I'd be willing to bet
it's either hardware fault or something to do with the display system
because it works in safe mode. Maybe it has simply defaulted to using
external monitor as main display and shows only black on secondary?
Well no, you could still access it via right button.

Next...even in NTFS systems (the machine does have NTFS???) it's not
unheard of that a file is lost, for instance due to a bad sector or
something, and a missing system file _could_ cause that behaviour.
Seems less likely, as it works in SM.

So the next order of business would be to check the drive for errors,
for which there are several methods, also checkdisk.

What would be best is to boot off an XP install CD and interrupt the
install ASAP exiting to commandline and running a disk check. FIXBOOT
and FDISK/MBR commands probably won't help as it does get pretty far
in the loading of the system. Of course you can also boot a Linux live
CD and do that from Linux.

If all is well, it's gotta be a bad driver or hardware malfunction
i.e. overheating or just plain broke.
You can, again, use the XP CD to run a repair installation - just
select repair instead of full installation - and all should be well
again.

But really, sometimes it can get so tangled (like viruses embedded in
filesystem) up that the _fastest_ and easiest way is just to make sure
you copy your documents, favorites, emails etc. and desktop/user
settings etc. onto a different partition or removable drive using a
boot CD, live CD or some other bootdisk (make sure you virus check
'em), and just FDISK the whole Xp partition clean (well all you need
to do is delete the directories and fdisk /mbr but I rather wipe it
clean) and then reinstall Xp. It only takes like 20 minutes after all,
so it might be the very easiest way. Just get the stuff you need to
safety first.
.