Solved Won't Boot Normally - Won't Boot With Any Disks

boweasel

Member
This 32 bit SP2 HP tower refuses to boot normally - just a constant view of the splash screen with the green horizontal bar. None of the other F8 options do a thing, so I put in a Vista DVD and rebooted.

I got the 'Press any key' followed by the loading of the files. When the white bar got to 100%, the screen went dark for at least a minute. Finally the cursor (moveable) appeared. And nothing else happened. After an hour I tried another disk - the time a factory Dell SP1. And I got the exact same scenario as with the previous DVD, ending with the white cursor pointer on a black screen.

Same thing with a Spotmau Bootsuite disk. I tried a BitDefender boot DVD - it brought up the initial screen where the language is selected, and shows the phrase 'The fun begins in 30 seconds', followed by a countdown to 0. When it hits 0 I get the 'Windows could not start. Please insert your Vista disk, yadd yadda, yadda'.

The only thing I can boot from is a Hirens Boot CD. From there I ran a Western Digital HDD test and it passed. It also passed 2 other hard drive tests on Hirens.

Since I've had identical boot problems using 3 different DVDs, I can't believe that it's the disks.

Anybody have some ideas or suggestions?
 

My Computer

Apparently I can't add to my own rep, but I have nonetheless solved the problem. Unbeknownst to me, this tower had developed some sort of problem with its validation (a problem that did not exist a few months ago), and this was preventing me from starting it in any method other than safe mode with command prompt. Once I selected that start option, I just let it sit there overnight. In the morning I could see the 'genuine' MSBS problem. I just validated over the phone, spoke the silly mega grouped characters, entered another silly mega group of characters and all was good.
 

My Computer

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