Diagnosing Windows Stuck in a reboot loop

[Valerie971HD]

PLEASE help me):my Sony VAIO won't start windows at all. When I turn it on, it brings me to a black screen where if i want to start windows normally, safe mode, you know? And it doesn't matter which one i pick now, it never brings me to the main menu screen.i decided to wipe out my hardrive, cause i thought it was a virus or something, but now when i turn it on, it says "Set up.." then it stops and an error occurs and tells me to restart & i when i do, it tells me the same thing): What do I do??

[slimxrlove]

PLEASE HELP! I have no disk drive on my computer. I own a "Dell INSPIRONMINI" and not only do I have the "Blue Screen of Death reboot loop," I also cannot access the internet with it. But let's start of with the diagnosis of the blue screen of death if we can! Please and thank you.

[linkinteen]

Mine would loop even in Safe Mode but the installation disk offered me a Repair option (not talking about the Recovery Console "Repair" option) and it fixed it.

[ThouGOD]

finally! some who will explain this stuff..thank you so much.. please see my video response. thank you again

[waffleworld94]

what if when you press f8 your only options are to do a system repair or start windows normally. both of which dont work and end up causing the computer to reboot again...i literally can do nothing but watch my computer continuously reboot without any means to stop it.

[Schonward01]

I have an xp service pack 3. It's an E machines media edition with a 160 gig hard drive. My error message if I'm correct is c000021a fatal system error. It says logon process terminated unexpectedly with a status of 0xc0000135. Any ideas ? Thanks for any help.

[xpressLOLzilla]

Mine flashes blue screen before switching off and on again. Thanks for the help though, I hope this method will work.

[cbrfan36]

Nothing is happening when i press F8. It just stops the auto timer from the auto reboot. Any ideas on what happened. We lost power and it has been doing this. The PC is 4 years old so i have no idea where the boot disk is of course. I have 150 gigs of movies on here and i dont want to lost them. Please help

[leandeganis]

did u mention troubles with the power supply? It can be a cause for that, and theres a lot more chances

[xXDylanXx13]

i got a ***STOP: 0x0000007F what is that can anyone pleses help

[potpen10]

Is there any way to fix the UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME problem without the CD? For a few reasons, I don't know if I even have it. Also, the specific computer doesn't have a CD drive, it is one of the little laptops without it. Please Help.

[TheMirixboy]

when i try to reboot my pc something says: REBOOT AND SELECT PROPER BOOT DEVICE or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key... help please

[stamosgang]

i start mine in safe mode and it loads a while and then says"windows is loading files"plus i cant enter on system recovery menu.what can i do for it plz answer its a big damn problem for me

[spongekiller4life]

i have a pcaptop so there isnt a keyboard until your at the normal homepage and you press a button to bring it up. what can i do?

[mrhenderson]

hey defcon I tried everything on the ultimatebootcd but when I cant seem to get to a command line. . And if I do, it'll be in Q:\ and I cant change it to C:, and chkdsk command doesnt do anything. Do you know what I can do?

[DefconComputers]

@mrhenderson often when the C: drive does not show up on the ultimate boot cd it is because the disk/OS does not have drivers for that drive controller. The UBCD basically is just windows XP, and unfortunately has little knowledge of newer SATA, and RAID controller cards.

An easy work around is to put the drive controller in IDE or SATA mode instead of AHCI in the bios.

[mrhenderson]

@DefconComputers I just got ahold of a Dell installation CD. . Got the recovery option and im back in business! Thanks for the help. Im starting a repair company so maybe we should collaborate

[AtoAndres]

umm i have the same kind of problem except i cant g into any safemode options and if i can get it to boot it will say stop visual not compute or something like that im using an alienware laptop. if you could help that would be great.

[dbhbabyd]

@AtoAndres Hey im having the same botting problem you did, did you fix it . i have an alienware lap top too.

[dacasman]

thanks for the tips man, really helped me out

[mrhenderson]

hey I had a power outage while running chkdsk and my computer does the same thing. I tried the Ultimate boot cd but cant find the recovery utlity..do you know what steps to take in the boot CD to fix this? Unfortunately I dont get the repair option on my xp installation disc.

[DefconComputers]

@mrhenderson While you are running the Ultimate boot CD you can run the chkdsk utility from the command line as you normally would (I think I have a video on doing that). It's just chkdsk DriveLetter: /F /X /R

Just make sure that the drive is actually being seen by the boot disk before you try to repair it.

Also not having the repair option is odd unless it is a disk from dell, hp, etc.

[mrhenderson]

@DefconComputers yeah its a dell...I'll try looking up the video but how do I get to the command line? Ive been going into HDD and trying chkdsk but they just scan the surface disk...not sure if Im doing the right thing, but I cant get to a command line

[GodzillaMecha2009]

i would do that but for some reason the computer wont read any cd disks of any kind. so back when it was working i used daemon tools lit as a resource to run iso files

[DefconComputers]

The disk read issue is likely just a bad or dirty lens in the CD drive. You could try a cleaning kit, but 95% of the time it still won't read. Only thing to fix that is a new CD drive.

[GodzillaMecha2009]

I have an Emachines XP irql less but not equal rebbot loop problem. I cant do anythinq with or without Safe mode. So how can I fix this.

[DefconComputers]

I would start the PC up with an Ultimate boot disk and let it run for a little bit, if that works I would verify that the file system did not get damaged and run a virus scan.

If the ultimate boot disk fails to startup I would check the ram first.

The IRQ less but not equal message usually occurs due to a registry problem, a virus installed as a driver, Broken antivirus software, or actually having bad hardware (Ironically the rarest).

[Ragnarok15]

Question, what if the c:\ drive is not showing in the recovery console and all i see is the Recovery files from the other partition from the main hard drive?

[DefconComputers]

A couple possibilities. One is that the recovery console went into the wrong "Windows config" and you need to select a different one when it starts up. If you get no option to select it, then maybe the C drive file system is corrupt. The other possibility is that the C drive might show up in the recovery console as another partition, maybe E, F, G, H, etc. That happens due to the order the drives were created on the system.

[DefconComputers]

Do you have the ability to make a Windows Ultimate boot CD, or Ubuntu live CD? (Check my videos on how to make those)

[Ragnarok15]

Now im making the Ultimate boot CD, but earlier i tried the bartpe bootable cd and tried the total commander. I tried using the total commander to see if i can recover the importan files like family picture and family video. However its said that the c drive isnt there. Kind a like it doesnt let me access it.

[Ragnarok15]

lso on the recovery console all i see is the two files from Recovery drive. i think its the h:\i386 and the h:\MiniNT which i dont really know those files are. On the blue screen of death i get this error called "UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME"

"STOP: 0X000000ED (0X86333C08, 0X0000006, 0X00000000, 0X00000000)"

[DefconComputers]

Bingo, you got a corrupt C drive. That H is a recovery partition.

You will want to run a check disk on that C drive once the ultimate boot CD starts up. You might be able to run it from the recovery console as well. However I recommend starting with the Ultimate boot CD and using HD tune to see if the drive has bad sectors on it before starting.

You might have to use some data recovery software to get your files off that damaged C partition, as chkdisk can fail on the repair.

[Ragnarok15]

do you think i can add recovery software on the ultimate boot cd? To be honest this is my time having encountered this type of problem. What the cause of this? Is it the virus?

[DefconComputers]

Most likely issue is a sudden power off of the system, unexpected shutdown, or a failing hard drive. Viruses usually don't do this.

Like I said you probably will need serious recovery software to get your files off that damaged partition, something that can read the raw file system without help from windows. I use R-Studio to do it, it's free to try, but limited to 64kb files in trial mode. Home licenses are like $50 I think.

[Ragnarok15]

Oh man thank you so much man. I just hope i manage to get those files.

[LOmonkey1225]

can you help me?one of my hp computer haves some kind of boot issue.each time i try to turn the computer on,it takes me to the windows xp load screen(like always)then it stops and restarts the WHOLE COMPUTER!plz help me,i wanna get back on my fast computer again :'[

[DefconComputers]

Using the steps I showed in the video what error code are you getting with the blue screen code?

[juliandjg]

Thanks man for all the info is nice to know all the code problems F8 did it for me. I was just wondering if the Ultimate Boot CD had like an option to fix this kind of problems so I didnt had to reformat it. Thanks.

[alecnemcova17]

Do you have a solution for a pc that restarts straight after the hp screen and runs in a loop....... thank you

[DefconComputers]

Pressing F8 at the start does'nt even give you a menu like I showed?

Can you get into the bios and be in that for a few minutes, or does it restart then as well?

[alecnemcova17]

No.......it restarts instantly after the first screen........can't get into safe mode or try other like known last good config..... can get into the bios settings though...... no problems with drives ect.  .......no warning beeps either......... thanks

[DefconComputers]

Sounds like your windows install might be jacked up. Can you boot from something like the Ultimate boot CD, or Ubuntu disk. If you can then it can isolate any potential hardware issues, and leaves just software (OS included) and drivers.