Aronathas

WinRAR, wonderful little thing. Better compression and you can password protect anything.

Not soldered, no. You can look at the harddrive when you have it out of the computer and see the jumpers and how they are configured. Here is a small picture: http://www.cheapcomputersandparts.com/Images/Parts/HardDrive-Jumper.jpg The center section in that picture is the jumper area, and the small black rectangular piece over the two pins on the far left is the jumper itself. It can easily be pulled from the pins and placed elsewhere. In some cases, especially newer drives, the various configurations are shown on the harddrive itself so that you can easily see the master and slave configurations.

Yes, but what I am suggesting is simply removing that one hotfix to see if it is the cause of all your troubles. Why would you want replacements if yours can be easily fixed? Personally I prefer to exhaust all other options before resorting to calling tech support..I'm sure there could be more than a few people here who think that is a bad idea, but thats how I am. And I've never had to call any sort of tech support..so you see, I am the kind of person who prefers to fix all problems, no matter how long it takes me Just saying, it would be best in my opinion to know what the problem is. After all, if you get the replacement and then have the same problem..Well, yeah. At the very least, see if the person being sent out to replace the parts knows what is wrong?

Well, even if they are sending such things, now that you can boot from the cd, can you not continue with what you were doing and uninstall that particular hotfix? At the very least you would know if that is whats really wrong or if another problem is lurking. Of course, if all else fails, theres the good ole reinstall windows...but I'd still prefer to uninstall the hotfix first, just to find out.

You can follow the uninstallation instructions on the following link: http://windowsxp.mvps.org/spuninst.htm I have never had to do this so I dont really have any other "helpful" tips, but if that doesnt fix the problem or if it doesnt make sense, say so here and we can continue the search for a cure to the common OS.

Have you recently installed a windows update? A quick search has placed blame on one "# 890859" update. Several people have claimed success by uninstalling the hotfix, but that of course requires you to use the Recovery Console..hope you have the WinXP cd and not just a restore-to-factory-defaults cd that companies insist on providing?

System Properties -> Advanced tab -> Environmental Variables. Under the System Variable section, the only thing missing that was there before was "tvdumpflags=8". The program was Spybot: Search & Destroy, I already had it running so I just used it to make the changes.

Well, this is very interesting. First, the thing that made no sense about why CheckDisk made it work is that the scans NEVER reported fixing anything. The scan found no problems, and yet once it was finished, the computer loaded up. However, it seems I have fixed the issue. With a useful little program I shut down a few programs on startup..so that they would not load on startup of course. Then I was just looking around for any small thing that could have been out of place. Considering these two computers are identical, that wasnt so difficult since I had this computer to compare with. When we first got these computers, I checked everything just to be sure they were the same, and they were. But last night, I noticed that a system variable was missing from the other computer that had been there before and that was present on this computer. I do not know the significance of this variable, and considering the fact that Safe Mode worked just fine, I am more inclined to believe that the problem was something in the startup list. Whatever the problem may have been, it is cured. The computer has loaded up perfectly twice now.

Well, as a last resort we can use the restore cd..but I'd really rather try to find a way to fix it without having to do that. One source suggested that windows security features were corrupted, but provided no insight into how one might correct this other than restore. Anyone able to shed some light on just how to do that?

Indeed. There are no options with these recent cds, you either run the cd and it formats the drive and then restores to factory defaults, or you don't run the cd. It is aggravating at best.

I searched many results from google before deciding to post here, and found all of the ones mentioned above. It seems none of them apply here. The problem with reinstalling the OS is that it came installed on the computers, and the restore cd gives only the option to completely restore.

So far this seems to be the only fix, but the problem is the computer has 20-30 GB worth of files that need to be backed up, but at the moment the computers have no means of saving such large amounts of information to an external source. Much of it potentially is already backed up, so it could be simple enough to save the remaining files and/or make a list of them and where to find them for replacement later.

Tried as ye suggested, but there was nothing involving GoBack mentioned anywhere. This is one of the reasons Im having such trouble, I can find no other reports of this problem. Programs and such that are usually associated with this error are not present on the computer, and it makes no sense. Thanks for trying though Any other possible ideas?

Not to my knowledge. These computers are new, just a couple of months old, and they came with 3 month trial subscriptions to Norton Internet Security(which I have been having troubles with on this computer. CCAPP.EXE refuses to end 9 times out of 10 and then my computer locks up. restarting is impossible). I havent seen anything mentioning GoBack though.

I am having some trouble with another computer here. It is exactly like the one I am on now, same software and such..but of course, it is not this computer. Windows XP Home Edition SP2 Since sometime around noon yesterday, whenever the computer is turned on/restarted, just before it gets to the logon screen, a blue screen comes up with the following error: STOP: c000021a (Fatal System Error) The Windows Logon Process System process terminated unexpectedly with a status of 0xc0000005 (0x0000000 0x00000000). The system has been shut down. I have searched for quite some time now and found no information on this error on Windows XP. Somewhat interesting is the fact that Safe Mode works fine, and if I run CheckDisk on the harddrive, I can log in normally after the scan is complete. Of course, if the computer is restarted the error appears again. Do any of you have any idea how to go about fixing this?