PC/WinXP problem

[zotz]

I've been trying to help a friend with his PC. It hung while he was upgrading a firewall and now won't boot. The hardware all checks out normal, it'll boot to the utility partition and I've run a windows repair on it, none of which has made any difference. It's a Dell Dimension 9150 running XP Home,

Any ideas? Thanks.

Comments

[grahamb.livejournal.com]

After you get the Dell logo on the bios splash screen hit F8. Boot XP in safe mode and see what happens. Either :

1. it'll bluescreen/halt loading a particular dll
2. as above, but if it's been told to reboot on a bsod you'll see naff all.
3. if it'll actually boot into xp you can just uninstall the firewall, reboot, reinstall as before to see whether it'll take the second time around.

[lovingboth]

The other thing to try is to see if it will boot with a live Linux CD and see what the Windows file system looks like.