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There are a great number of reasons why a Windows PC won’t boot ranging from hardware malfunction to virus/malware infections. Generally Windows hardware and software issues are proceeded by a Blue Screen of Death or BSoD to provide technical information regarding the crash. This error code can then be used to formulate a possible resolution.

Here at slighPC’s, we deal primarily with Windows XP mainly due to the fact that we believe this OS to be the most sufficient and stable OS Microsoft has released to date. And this is our recommendation when asked. Microsoft has made numerous revisions to their latest OS’s Vista and Windows 7. One such revision was the removal of the Recovery Console. Not to worry as your media should provide access to the commands necessary to follow this guide. In a first attempt to rectify the situation, provided the BSoD doesn’t list a well laid out solution, we like to start with a file system and hard disk integrity check.

Windows XP File system and hard disk integrity check

Requirements:

Windows XP media CD/DVD, Recovery Console pre-installed, or you can use one of our Recovery Console ISOs to burn a CD (we recommend that you use a media relevant to your Operating System’s specific Service Pack level).

Performing the Windows XP integrity check

To perform this operation you will first need to either boot from the Windows XP or provided media CD or select the pre-installed Recovery Console from the boot menu just after your computer restarts (This menu is generally only displayed for a brief moment during boot, so be sure to catch it in time).

When booting from the media CD/DVD you will be prompted with the message “Press any key to boot from CD”. At this point press any key to begin the media boot process. The OS will attempt to boot from hard disk if no key is pressed within the allotted time frame. After the initial CD/DVD load you will be brought to a “Welcome to Setup” screen in which you will have three options, Continue, Repair, or Quit.

From here we want to press the “R” key to begin the repair process initiation. After the disk is searched for Microsoft Operating Systems you should be prompted with yet another screen listing all of your Windows partitions preceded by a number asking “Which Windows installation would you like to log onto”. *Note – Different manufacturers utilize differing partition schemes, so determining the correct partition can be tricky depending on the scenario. Typically you’ll be looking for the partition labeled “1: C:\WINDOWS”.

At this point you would key in the number “1″ and press the Enter key to proceed. Next you will be asked to “Type the Administrator password:”. The password is dependent on your setup (Note – Windows XP Home does not include a true Administrator account and is generally left blank by most manufacturers). If you have no Administrator password, you can press the Enter key to continue. If you have forgotten your Administrator password you may follow the article “I lost my windows password…” to either blank or change it.

If your still with me up to this point you should be looking at a DOS prompt waiting for a command to be initiated “C:\WINDOWS>”. Time to start the integrity check… Type in the command:

chkdsk /r

and press the Enter key. You will notice the output displayed informing of the current action as well as the percentage completed. Run time will vary depending on your hard disk size and the number of issues processed. After the process is completed a summary is displayed. You can verify that corrections have been applied if you receive a message stating “CHKDSK found and repaired one or more errors on the volume.”

Note – If you receive the message “The volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems.” Your generally looking at a unrecoverable disk with corrupt/bad sectors, although this is not always the case.

After the chkdsk command is successfully run type “exit” (without the quotes) on the command line and press Enter to reboot your computer and hopefully boot back into Windows.

More to come soon…