Last week I had a computer under repair. The owner said that he would not load his Operating System. After connecting the essentials: monitor, keyboard and mouse, I turned on the machine. I got the ‘single beep’ which means the computer hardware is OK. It did complete POST but on the first screen of Windows XP it froze. And despite several tries, I couldn’t even get it to load in ‘Safe Mode’.

Normally, when I do maintenance or repairs, I always backup all the data on the PC. But since it couldn’t load your operating system, even in safe mode, this was going to require a different approach. This is relatively easy as long as you have a spare hard drive that has Windows XP loaded on it. I explain this procedure in my blog that you can read by clicking the link at the end of this article.

Once that task was complete, I was able to start troubleshooting your OS not loading issue. I was able to determine that three startup files were missing, moved, or deleted. The PC owner could have inadvertently deleted these files, or more seriously, Spyware or Viruses were responsible. So the OS installation had to be repaired.

We need the OS Installation Disk to perform this operation. But first, we need to modify the Boot Sequence in Setup so that the CD drive is the first boot device. Then set ‘Save and Exit’. Then restart the PC, insert the Windows installation disc and select ‘Boot from CD’. After a few moments of loading, a dialog screen appears with: Install – Recovery Console – Exit. You can try Recovery Console and follow the instructions, but I have found that the best method is to select Install.

After other moments, a message informs that an old installation has been detected, with the option of: a new installation or to repair the existing installation. I sew the ‘Repair’. You are then warned that the data may be lost during the repair and should be backed up. Having already saved the data, I clicked continue. From now on, it’s just a matter of sitting back and letting the repair install continue. A huge sigh of relief, twenty-five minutes later, when Windows finally loaded onto the desktop screen. I can confirm that all your data was still in place.

This is when you should restart your computer so that you can go back into setup and restore the boot sequence to how it was. However, I had noticed that their Anti-Virus program was almost a year out of date. Suspecting that a virus was the most likely cause of his missing files, shutting down the computer might have erased them again. Fortunately, I had an updated version of a well-known and reliable Anti-Virus/Anti-Spyware Utility on CD that has the option to run a virus scan from the CD. No less than 25 spyware and 2 aggressive worm viruses were successfully removed. The owner now has his computer back and phoned to say it was working fine and actually running much faster. I hope he has updated his antivirus.