16 replies to this topic

[Rainer_cr]

Hi,
I used the Ccleaner yesterday on several PC´s and wonderfull!!!!!! Than I decided to use the Defraggler on my laptop..... thats when the problem begun...
It took about 5 hours to defrag drive C not with out telling me before that I was about to run out of disk space on C. I did it anyways...
This morning I tried to switch on my Laptop with Windows XP and it kind of tries to start up for some seconds and than it crashes!! Then the display turns black and tells me:
"We apologize for the inconvenience, but Windows did not start successfully. A recent hardware or software change might have caused this" Than it gives me several options to start Windows, but none of them works!? Please help
What can I do now??
Rainer_cr

[T_Beermonster]

Rainer_cr, on Jan 29 2009, 06:00 AM, said:

Hi,
I used the Ccleaner yesterday on several PC´s and wonderfull!!!!!! Than I decided to use the Defraggler on my laptop..... thats when the problem begun...
It took about 5 hours to defrag drive C not with out telling me before that I was about to run out of disk space on C. I did it anyways...
This morning I tried to switch on my Laptop with Windows XP and it kind of tries to start up for some seconds and than it crashes!! Then the display turns black and tells me:
"We apologize for the inconvenience, but Windows did not start successfully. A recent hardware or software change might have caused this" Than it gives me several options to start Windows, but none of them works!? Please help
What can I do now??
Rainer_cr

Do you get a bluescreen or do you have windows set to auto-restart on crash? (for reasons I cannot understand this seems to be the default setting and its just plain stupid since people don't find out until there is a problem and if you cant get safe mode to work you cant turn the autorestart off and you can never see the error code)

Given that none of the safe mode or roll-back options work you probably cant do much to change that behaviour so that you can see the STOP error code.
Just to be sure though - all of the safe mode options will not work? - including command prompt?

If you have made no other changes to your computer and the only prior warnings you have had is that your C: drive was almost full (what are we talking about here, 5GB free or 1MB?) then its probably worth checking if the drive is so full XP cant boot.

The easiest way I can think to do this, if you have a CD drive on your laptop is to grab a Live CD and see if you can mount the drive and check the free space.
Any live CD will do, but for a small download and some useful HD management tools I'd suggest Parted Magic or a slightly larger download with more tools but less hand holding System Rescue CD

To start with all you want to do is see if the drive can be found, mounted and has any free space on it.
In Parted Magic this can be done by clicking on Partition Editor and looking at the information provided.
If the disk is indeed full then you may want to delete some junk or move some files on to a USB drive or similar. If you insert an external drive then it should be mounted automagically. To open your C: drive and select the files you want to delete/move click on "My Documents" and click on "media" (note these are single clicks not double clicks) your C: drive will be listed as sda1 unless you have other drives and partitions (it could be hda1 if you have a very old IDE drive and controller).

Hopefully this is of some help and the problem is simply a full drive. If this is no help then I'll see what else I (or anyone else) can suggest with whatever further information you can gather.

[Rainer_cr]

Hello,

Thanks for your reply!! Well, the space left on C is less than 1 GB it is about 600 Mb...

I can´t see the bluescreen, because it just flahes up for less than a second, and than it crashes, giving me the several options the start. None does work....

Rainer_cr

T_Beermonster, on Jan 29 2009, 12:19 PM, said:

Do you get a bluescreen or do you have windows set to auto-restart on crash? (for reasons I cannot understand this seems to be the default setting and its just plain stupid since people don't find out until there is a problem and if you cant get safe mode to work you cant turn the autorestart off and you can never see the error code)

Given that none of the safe mode or roll-back options work you probably cant do much to change that behaviour so that you can see the STOP error code.
Just to be sure though - all of the safe mode options will not work? - including command prompt?

If you have made no other changes to your computer and the only prior warnings you have had is that your C: drive was almost full (what are we talking about here, 5GB free or 1MB?) then its probably worth checking if the drive is so full XP cant boot.

The easiest way I can think to do this, if you have a CD drive on your laptop is to grab a Live CD and see if you can mount the drive and check the free space.
Any live CD will do, but for a small download and some useful HD management tools I'd suggest Parted Magic or a slightly larger download with more tools but less hand holding System Rescue CD

To start with all you want to do is see if the drive can be found, mounted and has any free space on it.
In Parted Magic this can be done by clicking on Partition Editor and looking at the information provided.
If the disk is indeed full then you may want to delete some junk or move some files on to a USB drive or similar. If you insert an external drive then it should be mounted automagically. To open your C: drive and select the files you want to delete/move click on "My Documents" and click on "media" (note these are single clicks not double clicks) your C: drive will be listed as sda1 unless you have other drives and partitions (it could be hda1 if you have a very old IDE drive and controller).

Hopefully this is of some help and the problem is simply a full drive. If this is no help then I'll see what else I (or anyone else) can suggest with whatever further information you can gather.

[T_Beermonster]

Rainer_cr, on Jan 29 2009, 02:13 PM, said:

Hello,

Thanks for your reply!! Well, the space left on C is less than 1 GB it is about 600 Mb...

I can´t see the bluescreen, because it just flahes up for less than a second, and than it crashes, giving me the several options the start. None does work....

Rainer_cr

Well we know a few things:
1. NT loader runs.
2. NT kernel and the hardware abstraction layer are present (though not necessarily correct) as their absence gives an unambiguous error.

Does the windows boot animation begin to play before the crash?
If it does then we know the boot process gets as far as reading the registry.
If it doesn't we know the boot process is failing on either the kernel debugger or the boot animation itself.


If you have not done so please try booting with a live CD. Check whether there exists a pagefile.sys file on the root of your windows drive, it should be a big file at least equal to the amount of ram you have in your machine. If there is not then windows may be failing when it tries to create a pagefile and does not have enough space. Clear some space and see what happens.
If a pagefile.sys does exist then it should be safe to delete it - windows uses the pagefile to hold any memory dump from a crash, on restart the memory dump is taken from the pagefile and written to a logfile before freeing the space on the pagefile. If you have limited free storage space the memory dump may be too large to be written. Deleting pagefile.sys should simply cause a new pagefile to be created on boot and no attempt to record the now lost memory dump.

[Rainer_cr]

Hi,

well yes windows is set to auto restart.

I tried all the save mode options and all I get is a long list of commands for a few seconds and then it crashes and tries to start again.
Free space on C is less than 1GB... if I remember well it is about 500 or maybe 600MB. And I remember that when I switched of the laptop, it was downloading a windows update...
I think the drive C is just to full...

I tried to boot from a CD but it does not respond.

T_Beermonster, on Jan 29 2009, 12:19 PM, said:

Do you get a bluescreen or do you have windows set to auto-restart on crash? (for reasons I cannot understand this seems to be the default setting and its just plain stupid since people don't find out until there is a problem and if you cant get safe mode to work you cant turn the autorestart off and you can never see the error code)

Given that none of the safe mode or roll-back options work you probably cant do much to change that behaviour so that you can see the STOP error code.
Just to be sure though - all of the safe mode options will not work? - including command prompt?

If you have made no other changes to your computer and the only prior warnings you have had is that your C: drive was almost full (what are we talking about here, 5GB free or 1MB?) then its probably worth checking if the drive is so full XP cant boot.

The easiest way I can think to do this, if you have a CD drive on your laptop is to grab a Live CD and see if you can mount the drive and check the free space.
Any live CD will do, but for a small download and some useful HD management tools I'd suggest Parted Magic or a slightly larger download with more tools but less hand holding System Rescue CD

To start with all you want to do is see if the drive can be found, mounted and has any free space on it.
In Parted Magic this can be done by clicking on Partition Editor and looking at the information provided.
If the disk is indeed full then you may want to delete some junk or move some files on to a USB drive or similar. If you insert an external drive then it should be mounted automagically. To open your C: drive and select the files you want to delete/move click on "My Documents" and click on "media" (note these are single clicks not double clicks) your C: drive will be listed as sda1 unless you have other drives and partitions (it could be hda1 if you have a very old IDE drive and controller).

Hopefully this is of some help and the problem is simply a full drive. If this is no help then I'll see what else I (or anyone else) can suggest with whatever further information you can gather.

[Rainer_cr]

I just found a way to see what the blue screen is about... I took a video with my camara while the laptop tried to start Windows. Pausing the video I can see the following message:

"A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.
If this is the first time you've this stop error screen, restart your computer. If this screen apears again, follow these steps:
Check for viruses on your computer. Remove any newly installed hard drives or hard drive controllers. Check your hard drive to make sure it is properly configured and terminated.
Run: chkdsk/F to check for hard drive corruption, and the..."

Thats all I can see from the blue screen.

Rainer_cr, on Jan 29 2009, 07:53 PM, said:

Hi,

well yes windows is set to auto restart.

I tried all the save mode options and all I get is a long list of commands for a few seconds and then it crashes and tries to start again.
Free space on C is less than 1GB... if I remember well it is about 500 or maybe 600MB. And I remember that when I switched of the laptop, it was downloading a windows update...
I think the drive C is just to full...

I tried to boot from a CD but it does not respond.

[gunner]

Move some files to another drive and it will work.

[Augeas]

Rainer_cr, on Jan 29 2009, 06:00 AM, said:

It took about 5 hours to defrag drive C not with out telling me before that I was about to run out of disk space on C. I did it anyways...

Rainer_cr, on Jan 29 2009, 06:00 AM, said:

And I remember that when I switched of the laptop, it was downloading a windows update...

Sometimes it taks a long time to draw out all the info. Although you are angry with Defraggler, did it finish properly or did you have a problem with it? (Apart from the free space warning which you ignored.) Why did you chop the Windows update? Did you stop the update or just power off your laptop?

[T_Beermonster]

OK then we have a few new bits of information.
1. There was a windows update in progress. Was it just downloading or actually applying the update? Things can go horribly wrong if you are combining low disk space with a half applied windows update (and corresponding system restore point creation).
2. You have a mechanism to see the blue screen. If you can read the STOP error code it may (or may not) be in the Microsoft knowledge base with known fixes.

You say you "tried to boot from a CD but it does not respond".
Do you mean that the boot process carried on as if the CD weren't there - in which case you need to enable CD booting or assign CD priority over HD in the BIOS. Usually the bios can be entered by pressing the delete key soon after power up but laptops sometimes use F1 or some other key, a message should briefly flash up on power-on.
Or do you mean the CD live environment booted but the HD could not be seen?

[Rainer_cr]

Augeas, on Jan 30 2009, 09:49 AM, said:

Sometimes it taks a long time to draw out all the info. Although you are angry with Defraggler, did it finish properly or did you have a problem with it? (Apart from the free space warning which you ignored.) Why did you chop the Windows update? Did you stop the update or just power off your laptop?

Hello,
well yes, the Defraggler finished properly. After that I still used the computer for a while (YahooMail) and then, when I switched it off, it downloaded an update. Than it switched off... After that I could not start it anymore I think that the Windows update finished properly...

[Rainer_cr]

T_Beermonster, on Jan 30 2009, 10:59 AM, said:

OK then we have a few new bits of information.
1. There was a windows update in progress. Was it just downloading or actually applying the update? Things can go horribly wrong if you are combining low disk space with a half applied windows update (and corresponding system restore point creation).
2. You have a mechanism to see the blue screen. If you can read the STOP error code it may (or may not) be in the Microsoft knowledge base with known fixes.

You say you "tried to boot from a CD but it does not respond".
Do you mean that the boot process carried on as if the CD weren't there - in which case you need to enable CD booting or assign CD priority over HD in the BIOS. Usually the bios can be entered by pressing the delete key soon after power up but laptops sometimes use F1 or some other key, a message should briefly flash up on power-on.
Or do you mean the CD live environment booted but the HD could not be seen?

Hi,
1. I think that the update downloaded...after finishing the session it was installing the update and then switched off
2. All I can see from the blue screen is what I wrote...
3. I tried again to boot from the CD and the HD can't be seen...

[Rainer_cr]

gunner, on Jan 30 2009, 03:44 AM, said:

Move some files to another drive and it will work.

Hello,

thanks for your advice. How can I move files without starting windows? Thanks.

[T_Beermonster]

Rainer_cr, on Jan 30 2009, 02:01 PM, said:

Hi,
1. I think that the update downloaded...after finishing the session it was installing the update and then switched off
2. All I can see from the blue screen is what I wrote...
3. I tried again to boot from the CD and the HD can't be seen...

If the HD cant be seen then we have a paradox.
The HD is clearly readable at least as far as loading the NT kernel.
If the HD isn't detected by one of the live CD's I have suggested then it is either broken or of an exotic type. Gparted shows no HDs at all?

If the HD is broken you wouldn't get as far as NT Loader you'd just get a message from the BIOS indicating that no bootable media were found (or something to that effect).
If the HD is some strange software raid type of confection then the Boot process may fail while loading the drivers if they were changed by the update - but HD controllers are usually boot rather than system drivers and laptops aren't usually using RAID.

If you have your windows XP disk (which you probably don't since manufacturers seem to think it is clever to send out computers with a hidden "recovery" partition which is about as much use as keeping the emergency safe key inside the safe) or have access to somebody else's XP disk it may be time to consider using it to get the recovery console up and check the disk for errors if it can be seen or roll back to one of your existing system restore points (if you have them) just on the off-chance that Windows XP has the right driver for your configuration and none of the Linux based disks do.

If the disk cant be seen by either the windows XP disk or one of the Linux disks then it would suggest the problem is either the HD or the Mother Board - but if that were the case you wouldn't get as far into the boot process as you do.

[Rainer_cr]

T_Beermonster, on Jan 30 2009, 03:35 PM, said:

If the HD cant be seen then we have a paradox.
The HD is clearly readable at least as far as loading the NT kernel.
If the HD isn't detected by one of the live CD's I have suggested then it is either broken or of an exotic type. Gparted shows no HDs at all?

If the HD is broken you wouldn't get as far as NT Loader you'd just get a message from the BIOS indicating that no bootable media were found (or something to that effect).
If the HD is some strange software raid type of confection then the Boot process may fail while loading the drivers if they were changed by the update - but HD controllers are usually boot rather than system drivers and laptops aren't usually using RAID.

If you have your windows XP disk (which you probably don't since manufacturers seem to think it is clever to send out computers with a hidden "recovery" partition which is about as much use as keeping the emergency safe key inside the safe) or have access to somebody else's XP disk it may be time to consider using it to get the recovery console up and check the disk for errors if it can be seen or roll back to one of your existing system restore points (if you have them) just on the off-chance that Windows XP has the right driver for your configuration and none of the Linux based disks do.

If the disk cant be seen by either the windows XP disk or one of the Linux disks then it would suggest the problem is either the HD or the Mother Board - but if that were the case you wouldn't get as far into the boot process as you do.

Hi again, I have the Windows CD and I tried to run it... it did load some drivers and then stopped telling me it can not read de HD....
In the Computer Set Up menu, running the self test option it tells me the HD is O.K.!?

[hazelnut]

Can you run chkdsk from the windows cd?

http://kb.wisc.edu/h...age.php?id=5097

[T_Beermonster]

Rainer_cr, on Jan 30 2009, 04:02 PM, said:

Hi again, I have the Windows CD and I tried to run it... it did load some drivers and then stopped telling me it can not read de HD....
In the Computer Set Up menu, running the self test option it tells me the HD is O.K.!?

As hazelnut says try running chkdsk from your windows disk.

This seems pretty definitely a windows problem rather than a defraggler problem so maybe one of the many Microsoft/Windows support forums could be more useful.

Just for clarity did you actually try running partedmagic or systemrescuecd? Or have you only been using the windows XP disk?

[Rainer_cr]

T_Beermonster, on Jan 31 2009, 12:21 AM, said:

As hazelnut says try running chkdsk from your windows disk.

This seems pretty definitely a windows problem rather than a defraggler problem so maybe one of the many Microsoft/Windows support forums could be more useful.

Just for clarity did you actually try running partedmagic or systemrescuecd? Or have you only been using the windows XP disk?

No, I only used the Windows XP disk....