PC refuses to boot up

Norman-B

My grandson's PC (has XP) refuses to boot up. I found out that he has had problems after visiting game sites. He also has been switching it off/on from the mains!!
Is it possible to start it up in Safe mode? I know very little on the subject.

espresso

Safe mode..............

Norman-B

Many thanks for your prompt reply and assistance!

Norman-B

We printed off the advice on Safe Mode and tried to start PC. We did as suggested and it will not boot up. Could it be a faulty Hard Drive or a loose connection perhaps?

sidthesexist

When you try to start the machine up how far does it get? does it get to the black screen where the bios and irq info is or does it go further to the windows splash screen?

happyevs

When in Safe mode can you use the arrow keys to goto The last good config then press Enter

Norman-B

sidthesexist wrote: »

When you try to start the machine up how far does it get? does it get to the black screen where the bios and irq info is or does it go further to the windows splash screen?

Thanks for replying. We can get as far as making a choice of;
Safe Mode
Safe Mode networking
etc.

When we press Safe Mode, we then get a whole page of lines of data, Multidisk etc. The screen then reverts back to the page we see prior to Windows starting.
Sorry if the above is not very detailed as I do not have the PC nearby, hence I'm having to go by memory on this. I could go and take a photo of the screen and report back.

Norman-B

happyevs wrote: »

When in Safe mode can you use the arrow keys to goto The last good config then press Enter

We are unable to get into Safe Mode. The PC keeps reverting back to the screen prior to Windows starting up.

happyevs

Have you tried getting into safe mode by continiously pressing F8 button as soon as you switch on p/c

Norman-B

happyevs wrote: »

Have you tried getting into safe mode by continiously pressing F8 button as soon as you switch on p/c

Off down the road to try this.

OK, I'm back. By pressing F8 as PC is starting up, it goes to a Boot Mode. There I have a choice of Floopy/Hard Drive/CD Rom and Lan.

sidthesexist

Pressing F8 will take you to the screen that shows

Safe Mode
Safe Mode networking
etc.

iirc? if you cant get any further then i'm not sure maybe a dodgy windows boot file? or maybe a hd prob?

By any chance the last thing downloaded/installed wasn't the latest patch for a game called Eve-online was it by any chance? as the patch deletes the boot.ini file from windows