Only a background at boot up, no icons etc.

[mrshovelhands]

Hi folks. My dad asked me to take a look at his pc because he shut it down the other night and it would not boot in the morning. The only thing that was different he says is that there were two windows updates ready to install.

The machine refused to boot. Tried safe mode and it still switched itself off and went to restart before it got half way to booting. Decided to format using drivescrubber (as usual).

Formatted this afternoon and reloaded it all this evening. No problems at all, untill I switched the computer off completely instead of using restart (which I had been doing during the reinstall of all the programs). When I tried to boot it up, it moved slowly and eventually came to the windows XP screen (the pretty default green mountain background). Unfortunately, that is all that is there, No icons, no task bar and it won't respond to any keybopard commands. All he now has is a pretty picture to look at.

Any suggestions would be very much appreciated.

Many Thanks folks

mrshovelhands.

[ski]

The hard drive may be bad.
Install it in another system as a Slave drive, and check it with the diagnostic utilities at the HD manuf's site.

[mrshovelhands]

The hard drive may be bad.
Install it in another system as a Slave drive, and check it with the diagnostic utilities at the HD manuf's site.

That's excellent advice. Thanks for that. I will take it out tomorrow and install it in my own system.

Much appreciated.

[Suenote]

try right clicking on your mouse and click on Arrange Icons "Show
desktop Icons":D

Suenote

[mrshovelhands]

try right clicking on your mouse and click on Arrange Icons "Show
desktop Icons":D

Suenote
Hi Suenote,

I tried that but the mouse is having no effect at all. It moves around but when I right click on the screen it has no effect. It doesn't react or bring up any options.

I've been told that one of the programs I am installing may be corrupt and causing problems, so I should install them all one at a time and do a complete shutdown and start from cold after every item. If this still proves futile, I will be doing exactly what our friend ski said and trying the HDD in my own system as a slave. Mind you, I've just been given a 7Gig HDD to use as a spare, so I may just popo that one in to his PC and try that. If it all loads with no worries, we have our culprit.

Thanks for the advice folks, I'll let you know what happens.

[ski]

Just a word of caution - The spare 7 GB HD may get confused if it's a bootable drive from another system that has different hardware than subject system.
Suggest formatting the HD on the subject system, installing an O/S, and then see if the system boots up.

[Suenote]

I guess you will have to try out what ski suggested :(

Sorry for your troubles.

Suenote

[mrshovelhands]

Hi again folks.

I would have updated sooner, but I've been very busy with the wife being in hospital, but now that is sorted it's back to normal.

Amazingly, the problem resolved itself. I gave it one more chance after formatting and started to reload items one at a time and doing a cold boot after each one. But this time everything went on perfectly. The only noteable difference was while setting up Wanadoo broadband using their official disk. While I was setting up Outlook Express, things turned up that had previously been missing like the POP3 and SMTP. They usually auto install themselves, but during the previous attempts they hadn't, however this time they loaded as they should. From there on, everything else went as smooth as could be.

Very strange eh? :confused: Only one item was any different, but when Wanadoo loaded itself properly, it all worked perfectly as it has done many times before.

Anyway, thanks for your time folks. :cool:

[Suenote]

Isn't it odd how sometimes the problem corrects itself? :D


Suenote :)