Hello, if anyone could help me with this super-irritating boot problem I would be very grateful. The machine is a slightly aged Dell desktop running XP. I don't know what happened to this machine as it broke 6 months ago before I was around, but basically, when you turn it on it appears to be starting normally and displays the xp startup screen, but then that disappears and all you get is an hourglass. No error, nothing, it just hangs and has to be manually turned off. I've checked as much as I could in the BIOS, it's set to boot from the correct drive. THere is a Dell setup thing as well which allowed me to do a quick diagnostic on the HD and it said that it passed. I've just got into a 'utility partition' and am currently running hardware checks on various things but haven't come up with any errors yet. So I think that this maybe is a software problem, but no idea what. I have an xp disk for another computer that I could use to get a recovery console but at the moment I wouldn't know what to do when I got there... Has anyone encountered this sort of problem before? Thanks so much!
sounds like a corrupt install. did the dell come with a recovery disk (cd)? if so, use it and follow the instructions. If you did not, you'd probably have to reinstall xp.
CAn you get into safe mode ? hit the f8 key on startup..if you can,then run antivirus.. sounds like a virus..
