The reasons why a PC operational system would not start

I believe every PC user has had this ugly experience, when you wait for your PC to boot up, but instead of your cozy desktop you get a blue screen declaring system fault or constantly rebooting windows OS. There are few reasons why this could be happening :

The most likely problem might be connected with a hard drive. Due to hard drive errors, the computer might not be accessing system file needed to boot up and therefore restart or even display a plain black screen with “system error” kind of message. It also could be infected with a virus. You can try to enter safe mode, by restarting your computer once again and upon the boot up screen pressing F8 key. It could be different function key in different models, please check your user manual, or try pressing several keys. Safe mode turns off system processes that are unnecessary and leaves the basic functions. From there you could run some system scans and tests. If the safe mode does not load up, there might be a problem with invalid “boot.ini” NTLDR missing files or unmountable boot volume.

1. Invalid boot.ini file

If you have a system errors with something like this

“…Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:

\Windows\System 32\Config\System…” try to do the following:

1. Take your bootable Windows XP setup CD and boot the system from it. Press “R” for entering a recovery console, from where you will be restoring the boot.ini file. Select the windows installation.

2. Enter your administration username password (if needed) and at the command prompt type this command “bootcfg/rebuild” without quotation marks and press Enter. The boot utility will run a scan of your drives and will display the results.

3. If you get a prompt “add installation to boot list”, type “Y”, meaning yes and press Enter.

4. Second prompt will ask to “enter load identifier”. Type the name of your operational system: “Windows XP professional” or “Windows XP home edition”. Press enter.

5. After a prompt “enter OS load options” type “/fastdetect” and press enter once again.

6. Now you can leave the system and restart your PC. Simply type “exit” command and press Enter. You computer should be working now.

2. NTLDR missing

NT loader is a boot loader of all Windows NT and XP OS releases. Here are the steps for fixing it:

1. Repeat the above steps 1 and 2 (exept for the command “bootcfg/rebuild” typing in point 2).

2. Type the commands (X is your CD/DVD drive letter):

COPY X:\i386\NTLDR C\:

COPY X:\i386\NTDETECT.COM C:\

3. Take out your CD and type “exit” to restart

3. Unmountable boot volume

The reason of it could be incompatible BIOS settings or corrupter/infected boot sector. First problem relates to disk incompatibility with higher BIOS settings. It could be easily fixed by accessing the BIOS setup and resetting the BIOS to default settings. Second problem (corrupted boot sector) is a  serious one – you might need to run a Windows repair setup.

This may seem strange, but I had the PC constant reboot problem with my Acer and Toshiba computers. Sometimes the system would start up and run for a few minutes and then again it would restart without any warning. It appeared, the problem was with a system fan – it had a lot of dust, which disturbed the cooling of the system, and with a high temperature the computer had to restart. So, in case you are experiencing something similar – clean up your fan from dust.

I hope you have found some helpful info. In case nothing helps, you might try bringing the computer to your local computer repair shop…