XP won't boot

[Squawk7777]

Hiya ppruners!

My girlfriend's lappy decided not to boot up anymore. All you get is the XP screen and that's it. The hdd stops loading. I tried all different combinations that the F8 menu lets me do - all to no avail.

I actually suspect a bad hdd. The bios menu doesn't let me do a scandisk-like task, not sure if it ever did. Now, most of you will say to pop in the XP CD and proceed from there. Well, my friends, we're talking about an Acer Aspire One which has no CD drive.

Since I got my laptop running and have a spare USB stick or dongle as you say, I wonder if it is possible to create a bootable USB stick with a diagnosis tool on it. I did a quick Google search but was overwhelmed with complex instructions. So my question to the tech ppruners: What (or how) would you do to solve this?

(I feel a trip to the store coming up ... ugh!)

7 7 7 7

PS: More info...

In safe mode, XP stops booting when it reaches:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\Windows\System32\Drivers \Mup.sys

[hellsbrink]

This little rascal will boot from a USB stick, and may be useful

Ultimate Boot CD - Overview (http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/)

Hiren's Boot CD will work off of a USB stick, it's also worth looking at as it has a feature called "Mini XP" which loads up a severely cut down version of Win XP so you can trawl through your existing installation to look for problems.

Hiren and Pankaj's Homepage » www.hiren.info (http://www.hiren.info/)

Now, as far as the issue itself goes, "multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\Windows\System 32\Drivers\Mup.sys" is not actually the problem because it has loaded. The problem lies with whatever will be loaded AFTER that, which I THINK is likely to be the graphics card driver. Chances are that either the driver is corrupt and needs to be reinstalled or there is corruption in the registry which needs to be repaired

[Spitoon]

Don't know much about the Aspire but many Acers have a recovery function which will restore to factory defaults (I can't remember for sure but I don't think there are options that enable you to keek your files/work).

At boot up, press <Alt>+<F10> and see if it offers you anything.

Good luck.

[Squawk7777]

Thanks for your replies. I looked on the ACER tech support site and it also mentioned the <ALT>+<F10> menu. It worked, but when the "recovered" XP starts it goes into the consistency check mode and so far has found two errors that it corrected and now seems stuck:

correcting error in index $130 for file 1468 (twice)
sorting index $130 for file 1468.

Now it's stuck at 12 percent. :uhoh:

[simountain1]

Points to the hard drive. I had exactly the same problem a few weeks back, as it happened it was a backup drive I have in the machine causing the issues, mine did exactly the same stuck on the XP screen.
The problem is the recovery partition on newer machines is on the HD so if it fails then youve had it basically.
Do you know anyone with a windows XP cd rom you can borrow, as long as the machine has an XP licence sticker on it with a key then you are fine, it just means serching round for the drivers for it but it can be recovered.
EDIT sorry didnt see the no cd rom drive bit.