Machine will not boot to XP, safe mode, or last known cfg

I have some friends in another state who I give free PC support to (they're in school and can't afford paying someone locally).

They have an IBM ThinkPad, XP Pro notebook computer that all-of-the-sudden stopped booting into Windows. It takes them to the screen that asks you to choose whether or not to boot into safe mode, last known good config, command prompt, etc. Unfortunately, they cannot boot into safe mode, or use anything on the menu (but maybe the command prompt - haven't tried that one).

I know that I've seen this before, but I thought that someone might have seen this recently, and could direct me to the solution. I seem to remember having to manually restore the registry using DOS, maybe?

What happens when you try going into one of those modes? Do you receive and error message or does it just reboot?

If you have some sort of bootdisk you should try that since it might help detect any hardware problems that have come up.

Good luck.

When they select any of those options, it reboots and comes to the same message. I think that it is a corrupt registry, though I do not know of any errors indicating this. I'm going to walk them through the recovery process using the XP CD and hopefully that will resolve this.

yeah yeah...
i think your best best is to do a repair windows install...
after that, rebuilding the boot situation on that windows install could work things out...
also, check out the cpu temp (in the bios) and see if it's running too hot... that could cause a reboot...

We worked on this notebook this weekend (over the phone) and the laptop would not recognize the Windows XP CD (the one used to install this PC's OS). So not only is the system not allowing them to go past the "We're sorry for the inconvenience..." screen (where they can choose Safe Mode, Command Prompt, Last Known Good Config, etc.) but now it doesn't even allow them to use bootable CD's.

I can get into the BIOS, I disabled the BIOS from booting to the HD (setting the boot order to use the CD-ROM only -- just to see what would happen) and it said that no operating system was found. The BIOS sees the CD-ROM drive, so I'm going to have her check the XP CD on another PC to see if it is messed up. If anyone has seen this on another PC (caused by virus, spyware, etc.) let me know.

IS it a Real copy of Windows?

He he he - yes, it is.

It could be an "Unmountable boot volume". I've done two repairs like this one on windows xp pro and on xp home. You can download the program from microsoft, which when you run the program it makes six floppies that you use to run chkdsk and also repairs the boot.ini file. The boot.ini file is corrupted. Be sure you download the correct program because xp home is different from xp pro, one will not work on the other.

Hope this helps

but even if the boot.ini file was corrupted, it should still be able to boot from the xp cd, right?

You would think so, but sometimes they don't. Hey, this is Microsoft so anything can happen.

Good Luck

*bump* .. i'm getting the same problems with my sisters computer. i can't even get the windows xp install disc to install .. once it says "Starting up Windows Setup" i get a blue screen. i've tried the 6 floopy disc setup that should go there and i get the error "File \bootinfo.ini could not be loaded. The error code is 4096." .. NEED HELP!!!!!

This problem has happened to two of my friends this week and also to three or four people on another forum i use, all of which are using pirated versions of Windows XP Pro.

*Interesting*

None of which have found a fix at present.

could u post up that forum where the others are having the same problem.

To fix this problem boot from the Windows installation disk, press R to repair.

Now from the command line repair the boot volume and restart, all should be fine.

hey this happend to me 2 days ago its when i tried to screw with the boot skins all i had to do was reset cmos and everything worked i tried the last known CFG and safe mode but it auto restarts

then it goes straight to the BSOD ( Blue screen of death )
and it tells u to repair it but i just reset cmos and everything came back

try that it takes 2 seconds and its not that hard