Xp Rebooting

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Emmaxxx

1
Hiya :)

My friend's PC has recently developed problems, constantly rebooting at the Log On screen. Sometimes he can manage to get into safe mode to run Norton Antivirus, but this will lock up mid way through the scan ??

His machine is fairly new, running XP.
The last thing he wants to do is format is HDD.
Please could someone advise of what things to try

Thanx
Emma
XXX
 
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scarecrow

1
Press F8 at startup and boot the "last known good configuration", or boot at safe mode and enable a normal system dump- so you can attach the dumpfile here- only that way we can see why the system fails to boot properly.
 
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Emmaxxx

1
Thank you for your reply scarecrow :)

Not sure where to find the dump file once in safe mode and can it be opened like a txt file for copying and pasting here?

Thanx
Em
XXX
 
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slippery

1
Sounds like bad memory to me - have him switch it around, and or take one stick out and try that, then try swapping it to the other slot.
 
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Emmaxxx

1
A Big Thanx guys for your replies ;)

I've passed the info on.....incidently I looked up the .dmp myself and could not locate such a file in that location? Search came up with C\Windows\Minidump with either 4 or 5 .mini.dmp files and when opened didn't really make any sense. ?

Thanx
Emma
XXX
 
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scarecrow

1
It's a "minidump" file because the system is tuned to create such files:
Settings/Control Panel/System/Advanced/Startup and Recovery/Write Debugging Information.
A normal dump would be more informative, and a full dump even more, but the last may get huge (bigger than 100 MB). But even a minidump can be useful, please pick the last one (check the file timestamps), zip it and attach it here.
Dump files are best read with a hex editor.
 
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