Jswerve

when I load Windows XP Pro (SP2) I get a black screen with nothing on it but the cursor for the mouse. Everything looks great up to this point. Anyone have any ideas? The details are in my sig...

__________________
Try adjusting the open gimbles, sometimes that does the trick. Its the thing next to the doohickey...

phospholipid

tried booting into safe mode? hit f8 at start up BEFORE the load screen and see if you can boot into safe mode without networking. if you can, try running a reg cleaner of a disk or a diskeeper off a disk and disable al start up files. it sounds like a explorer.exe prob

if that doesnt work, do you have a windows disk (oem or not)?

__________________

Jswerve

Yeah I am in safemode right now. Loads that fine. Hmmm lemme see if I can find Diskkeeper on a disk and report back the results, thanks.

__________________
Try adjusting the open gimbles, sometimes that does the trick. Its the thing next to the doohickey...

Jswerve

I have a Windows XP Pro disk...

__________________
Try adjusting the open gimbles, sometimes that does the trick. Its the thing next to the doohickey...

Pwnage

Damn kids =/. Sound like one of your system files is corrupt. A diskkeeper should help. Good luck

Jswerve

I don't have a reg cleaner or diskkeeper on disk now what?

__________________
Try adjusting the open gimbles, sometimes that does the trick. Its the thing next to the doohickey...

NullWolf

Try running chkdsk /r on the drive in question.
Boot from your XP CD and then select the first Repair option and do it from there.

As far as startup items, check msconfig and try disabling a few (or all) your startup items. But sounds like corrupted file, which CheckDisk will usually take care of... (my daughter liked to continuously turn my comp on/off, and f'ed up a couple of files that way... chkdsk fixed it fine, and usually works great at work for everything from BSoD to "Unable to boot" messages)

__________________

Jswerve

Thanks, I'll try that...I completely forgot about the CLI option to check the disk.

__________________
Try adjusting the open gimbles, sometimes that does the trick. Its the thing next to the doohickey...

phospholipid

if you have a seperate computer with a CD burner DL diskeeper off the net and run it AFTER a chk dsk, thats if the chkdsk fails. i doubt it will, if chkdsk doesnt work try running a repair from the xp disk install (theres an option for repair reinstall, just basically copies important windows flies to the directories they should be in)
this repair reinstall (non-destrctive) may require drivers to be reinstalled but all will not be at a lost.

if chk dsk doesnt work and neither does the repair reinstall or the defrag from diskeeper, try DLing ccleaner (yes, two c's) and burning it to a disk and running that. if all else fails, come back and and ill show you hirens boot disk

__________________

Jswerve

Got it fixed. Enabled VGA mode then I could see the desktop. Next I downloaded the latest ATI driver, uninstalled the old one, rebooted to safe mode and used driver cleaner, then restarted and installed the new driver. Thanks for the help all.

__________________
Try adjusting the open gimbles, sometimes that does the trick. Its the thing next to the doohickey...