The blue screen of death?

Question

After defraging and doing an antivirus scan on my computer, I believe I accidentally deleted an infected windows programme. The computer then didn't allow me to do anything, went from bad to worse, icons took ages to load on the desktop, (then were useless anyway) and now I'm just getting the XP screen with the darker blue horizontal bands at top and bottom.
Key stokes and mouse actions do nothing. Screen stays frozen.
I've been told I need to reboot. Where did I start if the whole thing is frozen. I do have the XP disc but no boot floppy!
Help please in plain English.

Answer 1

revert back to factory settings if you have the disk

Answer 2

Alrighty

First, you should make sure that window will not fix itself.
Upon restart, press the f8 key on your keyboard repeatedly, to bring up the selective startup window.
Use the up and down arrow keys to highlight "Last known good configuration." and click enter.
Windows will start normally if this is successful.
If not, go to plan B.

If you have the original CD, you can use it to repair your installation of WinXP. You don't need a boot floppy.

Make sure your bios is set to boot from cdrom first.
Then reboot your PC.
Don't be dismayed when it goes to setup and starts to load drivers. This is a good thing.
When all has been loaded, you will see a screen that wants to know what you are attempting to do. The choices are setup, repair, and quit.
Initially, you will want to choose setup.
Windows will look for existing installations on your PC.
It should find your tainted installation and display it by name.
It now wants to know what you want to do with this installation.
It is at this time you tell it to repair.
Again, don't panic when it starts to delete files. These are operating system files that the repair plans on replacing. Your other programs won't be affected.
The rest is mostly watching. The machine will replace the files and reboot.
Window should start normally.
Remember to reset the bios to boot from hard drive first.

I hope this helps

Answer 3

Reboot the system by pressing the power button and holding it down. Then when windows starts to load up or rather just before, hit F8 and a boot option window will apear. Try to go to Last known Good configuration and see if that fixes it. If that does not fix it you can try to insert the XP disk and use the recovery console, but if you deleted a protected OS file that may not work. You can also repair your installation if that option is available to you. XP has OS protection on it and should rewrite the file for you after reboot. So power down and power up, remember hold hte power button until it shuts off, it will take a few seconds. FInally if it asks you to run a CHKDSK do it, and if you get into the recovery console you can also try to run CHKDSK by typing just that at the command prompt and see if it repairs the file for you.

Answer 4

That isn't a blue screen of death, the BSOD has only white text on it giving you a very cryptic error message.

Reboot means to turn the PC off and back on again. If it is frozen you can just turn the power off and on again, even though you shouldn't do this normally.

If this problem occurs again after you have turned the PC off and back on again then try rebooting again and pressing F8 for Safe Mode. If that does not work you can try booting from the XP disc. Turn your PC off, put the XP disc in the drive and turn it back on. Watch for a 'Press any key to boot from CD...' message. If this does not appear and the PC reboots normally then you need to go into BIOS and tell it to try to boot from CD before your hard drives.

Once you boot from the XP disc you can run a repair of your XP install. Follow the on screen prompts VERY carefully or you may delete all your data.

Answer 5

From the sound of it, your only option (unless you want to try to manually repair the install) is to simply reformat. Understand that reformatting will wipe everthing on your hardrive and it will be like a new computer again. This will fix your problem, but at the same time, any data you had will be lost. If you need help with saving the data there are things you can do, let me know if that is the case. If not, just put in the XP disc and reformat.

Answer 6

Reboot in 'safe mode' - press F8 when you see the 'windows' bit loading....

When you have the desktop and icons visible, go into start/all-programs/accessories/system-tools/system-restore.

Go through the options to restore you system back a few days to before you had the problem. It's very simple, and very effective... then just don't do what you did to cause the problem again..! :)

The system restore does not literally restore everything to how it was, so you won't loose any personal documents or files, it's just the 'system' itself.

Answer 7

First try restarting in safe mode. Press the restart button and hold down F8 when Windows starts to load. This should get you to a stage where you can rescue your data. Now reboot with the XP disk in and Windows should reinstall.

Answer 8

You can boot from the XP Cd so dont frett to much,

If you press the num lock when your pc crashes does the light on the keyboard go on and off? if so then its not to serious.

Try booting the computer in safe mode by pressing F8 when it first starts up (about once a second untill a text selection comes up)

Answer 9

Assuming you're on here by using another computer then?

If you can't find an answer... reboot with the disc in the hard drive and let it try to pick it up for you... click yes... to go back to the last date your memory can find... to reset everything... this way you only lose most recent stuff... and if that doesn't work... you will have no other choice but to start again from scratch... and wipe the drive... and re-install XP once again.

Experience of 23 years with computers.

Answer 10

First, get into the BIOS and configure it to boot from CD. If not familiar with BIOS, ask a friend that is. Mistakes in the BIOS settings can make it go from bad to worse.

Once that's done, boot with XP CD in the CD tray.

If there is nothing on your PC you need to save, just re-install it. If there is, choose repair.

Good luck and hope that helps!

Answer 11

Need to do a windows repair.
Insert Windows XP boot disk, skip the first repair, continue as if you were doing a reinstall, but do not go any further unless you see something like "Windows Operating system detected do you want to repair..."