help! can't boot into windows after changing timings

J

JeRi

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 28, 2005
Messages
276
hey everyone...woke up this morning and turned on my computer, and now i can't get past the windows xp loading screen. last night i decided to play around with my memory's timings a bit and run sandra, and when i was finished, with some minor changes, i decided to just leave the comp off for the night and give it a break after all the playing around i had done with it. now this morning, i can't get into windows. i returned all my settings in my BIOS to stock speeds, so the system is not overclocked whatsoever (thought it mite be a voltage issue or something), but that hasn't done the trick. any ideas? please, as i really really hope something didn't go wrong like frying my mem or something like that? i've only had my rig OC'ed for a few days now after about a week of playing around with it (my first time ever OCing)

My Specs:

AMD Athlon64 3200+ Newcastle @ 2.45Mhz | Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe nForce4 SLI | XFX 6600GT 128MB PCI-E (w/ Zalman 700Cu HSF) @ 550/1100 | Corsair XMS 1GB(TwinX1024-3200C2PT) PC-3200 @ 204.5MHz | OCZ ModStream ATX 2.0 450W Power Supply | Western Digital 74 GB SATA 10K Raptor | Seagate Barracuda 200GB SATA | Acer AL1715S-8 17" LCD Monitor | Windows XP Pro Corp w/ SP2

I had my CPU @ 2.45Mhz (245mhzx10xmulti) and ram running at 204.5mhz. I can't even boot into Safe Mode, so I'm realy stumped by this, and concerned as well.....
 
turn the psu off at the back switch or unplug it, count to 20 slowly, plug it back in and/or turn it back on with the rear switch.

Hold down the insert key and press the front panel power button.

If the machine goes into the bios select "load failsafe defaults" or the equivalent and save and exit bios.

reboot and start tapping the F8 key about one every second as she boots up in hopes of getting the windows boot option menu and try the safe mode. Pray.


If you can get into safe mode, you might be ok, shutdown and see if it will then boot normally. Pray.

If not put in your windows CD and boot from it and under the install options you should see a "repair existing windows installation" choose that. Pray.


Pray some more.


good luck.
 
ugh, didn't work....i tried booting from both memory sticks individually, still got the same problem....tried throwin in my windows cd and didn't do anything...tried resetting cmos (i think i did it right - pulled out battery and moved jumper over for 10 seconds, put it back to original spot and then put the battery back in) and that didn't work either...does it look like i fried my memory? don't understand how that happened though, because it was working fine up until i went to bed at like 2:30AM last night
 
i'm just stumped by this...i'm gonna try opening up my parents' old gateway comp and steal a stick of memory from there and see if i can at least boot up and be sure it's just the ram...guess i gotta look into getting some higher quality ram which can handle a little bit of OCing...any suggestions? what about Corsair TWINX1024-3200C2PRO 1GB Kit? it's about as much as i can spend being that i wasn't planning on this at all... really bummed about this :(
 
"can't get past the windows xp loading screen"
"tried throwin in my windows cd and didn't do anything..."

go into the bios and set the CD as the first boot device.


The machine still POSTS right ? get the beep ? can go into bios ?

(if yes to the above, most likely its just a scrambled windows install, some file got trashed in your tweaking adventure)
 
If you can get into the bios then your memory is probably ok.
Best way to test it is download and run Memtest86.
Either put it on a floppy or bootable cd.
It self-loading so a working copy of Windozes is not needed.

It sounds like you've either hosed the boot record or the file system on your hard drive.

Luck........ :D
 
yeah it posts and i can get into bios....i'm tryin my windows cd, altho i tried it before and got some error...

goes thru all the files and says starting windows or whatever, then i get a blue screen:

*** STOP: 0x00000024 * (0x002902FE, 0xF7CAA6DC, 0XF7CAA3D8, 0XF746AF81)

*** ntfs.sys - Address F746AF81 base at F741B000, DateStamp 41107eea


no clue what that is...gonna look it up on google to see if i can find anything

not really worried if i messed up windows, as i have a semi-recent ghost backup of my C drive, so if i can get a fresh install of windows goin, i'll be happy that i don't have to spend $100+ on new memory
 
found my parents' original xp home disk, can't even use the repair console...gonna see what other options i may have...

found another xp disk, can't repair or do a fresh install...kind of stuck now as i can't do anything with my hard drive?
 
gonna use WD data lifeguard diagnostics floppy to just try to wipe the hard drive clean as that's probably my only option

that seemed to clear out the hard drive..formatting now, and gonna try a fresh install of windows...hope this works. keepin my fingers crossed
 
ntfs.sys


thats a driver for your NTFS file system on the HD. Think you on the right track, odd I would have thought the install disk would have overwritten it with a good version. oh well.
 
yeah i thought so too....but i got a strange error when i tried just using the windows xp disc...but the reformat worked, now i have to spend time and reinstall everything that was on my computer before the problem...ugh :mad: but at least my memory isn't fried....


thanks for your help through all this
 
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