Last night we had thunderstorms roll through our area. We had intermitent power outages and during one of them, I instructed the computer to shut down. In the process of shutting down, we had a power failure that lasted the whole night. Upon getting to my computer this morning, it was going through the startup sequence, would get as far as the boot screen, then power down and go through the whole sequence again. During the next boot up, a screen appeared asking me to select the mode that I last started successfully in and I tried the normal mode. Then it would shut down. I tried booting up in safe mode (one of the options) and again it would re-start itself. I could not get to the windows screen at all. I have Windows XP. The computer is about 2.5 years old. Can anyone help with this?

Hi there

Your opperating system is corrupt. When Windows shuts down it save some important info to important files.
Obviously on of the files needed for startup was being written to when the power failed.

So, there are to main things that you can do.

1- Remove your hard drive and install it in another PC, friends or so. Make sure when you install it on the other system that you change the Boot Sequence on the other machuine to not boot from your hard drive.
After installing and starting up windows on the other machine, go to My Computer and find out what Drive Letter the PC has givven to your hard drive, Ex, (Local Disk E:). (If you want, backup your files from here.)
Now open command prompt, (Click Start -> Run, and type CMD or COMMAND)
Now in Command Promt type: chkdsk e: /F (e: being the drive letter of your drive.)

After the scan, insert the drive back into your system and start normally. The chances of this working is about 40%

If this doesn't work then you need to get the Windows XP disk you used to install your XP. IMPORTANT, it needs to be the same disk.

One your PC, set the Boot Sequince to boot from the CD and insert to XP disk. Now restart.
During bootup it should ask you if you want to boot from CD... Press any key during this question.

The setup will start. Firstly it will ask you if wou want to repar windows using the recovery console? Don't select this feature. Say install Windows. Now it will check for exsiting Windows installations. It should find it and ask you if you want to repair this installaing. Now say yes.

This should sort out you problem.

Please let me know of this helped.

Cheers
Grant