My mom’s computer is running Windows 2000. It’s a p3 1.3 ghz system with about 163 megs of ram. Yesterday it was working fine, but today it won’t start up. I hit the power button, it shows bios, shows the little loading windows screen, then the graphical windows loading screen, and then it flashes, REALLY fast, a blue screen with a little text on it and restarts. I’ve managed to see that the top of the blue screen says something about the registry file error, but I can’t start in safe mode, can’t get into a command prompt or anything. It always gets to the blue screen and restarts without me pressing anything. I’m pretty sure 2000 isn’t DOS based, right? So i have no idea on how to restore the registry (in 98 i could use a command in the dos prompt). Any ideas?
I’m not very sure, but there’s always the possibility you got infected by a virus…
If you have a descent antivirus software, most probably the CD’s that come with it, are bootable (Norton antivirus I think it is…)…
You can use this to boot your computer and perform a virus scan for start… Just to exclude this possibility…
Apart from that, if you have a windows boot disk, you can use this to boot your computer and fix things… I think Win2000, weren’t that much DOS “independant” :P, as most people think…
so bascily its XP but one version behind so NO ITS NOT DOS BASED.
but yes it should have a repair console for fixing stuff.
booting from the cd is the option however it may not help much coz i found the XP fixing thing very annoying. it looks just like dos mode but has differnt comands for everything so i soon gave up trying, and ended up jsut re-installing over the top of the old xp, then saving my files to backup and re-installing from scratch .
before you do any of the things below boot up your computer and when it tells you to hit F8 to troubleshoot windows do that and got to boot last known good configuration. Windows should load, but if that doesn’t take care of it. do the steps below.
if you have the Windows 2000 disc you can go into the bios and change the bootable devices. nomally the 3.5 floppy looks for boot files first then the hard drive second and then the cd-rom. go in to the bios and look for a tab that says something like advances chipset go in there(but only if you know what you are doing i dont want you to kill your computer!!!) then you should see something like first boot device floppy hit the page up button until it says CD-ROM hit F10(this is to exit the bios and save the changes that you have made) then enter(this is to confirm that you want to save your changes in the bios). your computer will reboot and place the Windows 2000 cd in the cd-rom. then after the the pre-boot happens(you know when it does the memory test). it will ask you to boot from cd hit any key. let the windows setup check what you have on your system. it will say load scsi drive and about 300 other things like that. then it will say starting windows. after it say that the options will appear of the screen the first on say something like press enter to install windows 2000. the next one will say something like to repair the current version of windows press R. and i have forgot what the other one says but it is not important. you press the r button and another message will appear on the screen. the options are some thing like press c to continue the repair of windows. the other one is like press E for emergency repair(but this requires another disk.) my advice is to just to let the windows 2000 setup dics fix it. so press the C button and another message appears and will say something like windows 2000 setup disc checking you drive for any errors and it will check your current windows 2000 that you have on your computer and fix any problems that it has on it. after it does this another message comes up and says something like your computer will reboot in 15 seconds. please remove anyDisk that are in the A:\ drive. remove the windows 2000 cd from the Cd-rom and then your computer will reboot. and it will go thro the pre-boot and the boot phase and then it will say boot from cd press any key. do not press anything. and if the windows 2000 setup disk fixed the problem it will load windows no problem but if it didn’t fix the error. then it will repeat the problems that you are having now. if it did work. restart the computer and hit the delete key and change the first boot device back to the floppy. by hitting the page up key. the hit F10 key again and enter key and your computer will reboot and it will not try to boot off the cd-rom any more. if it does not work i suggest that you just go ahead and reinstall windows 2000.