PC was running a bit slow this morning so I shut it down to restart it. Now it won't go past the windows xp screen. Just keeps going back to the 5 start up options – none of which are working.

Running avg anti viris, etc.

Can't find the windows disc and don't even know if I have one.

What are my options please?

buy a mac

If it wont start in safe mode and you dont have the recovery disc not many options left to you really.

buy a mac

Oohh how original…….Yawn 🙄

Get a windows disc from a friend for the recovery process?

buy a mac

You mean like the one Columbo has?

What are my options please?

Look harder for the XP disc!

(or download one and use that)

buy a mac

Why would I want to do that, I already have a computer that doesn't work.

Original post though, never expected anyone to say that. You're awesome.

Yeah you will need a recovery disc of some sort, stick it in and run a repair from the Windows install

Unless of course its got a recovery partition on the PC HDD, some Dells and HP's have this, what make is it ?

How to get into Windows XP recovery console without a Windows XP CD

It's an hp media centre

GrahamS

Hmmm bootable floppy discs, anybody actually own a floppy disc anymore or even have a PC with a floppy drive ?

The first thing I would do is to run a disk diagnostic like Seatools as the disk failing with bad sectors is a common cause of problems like yours.

BTW it's the f10 key to access the recovery partition on startup on a HP.

I think its F10 on HP's to boot into the recovery application, just keep hitting F10 while the PC boots and follow the options from there.

Good luck….

okay so I'm downloading this 'Windows XP Home Edition with Service Pack 2 Utility: Setup Disks for Floppy Boot Install' onto a memory stick. Is that correct?

Will I lose anything on the pc when I start up from this?

Thanks for the help btw.

Hmmm bootable floppy discs, anybody actually own a floppy disc anymore or even have a PC with a floppy drive ?

Eh? Oh that's a bot of crap guide then. Sorry, I only scan read it.

Do a bit of googling there a ISOs available that will create bootable CDs containing the "Windows Recovery Console", which is what you need.

Try F10 before doing anything

Its likely to be an OEM version of Windows that HP use so anything you download might not work properly anyway.

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ also contains some useful tools and provides bootable Linux OSes where you can run a scan on your hard disk, copy your files somewhere safe etc.

First press of f10 only gave me some blurb about scanning the disc. So tried pressing f10 continually and finally got into something – at the moment it's a pic of a mountain and the moon. Doesn't seem to be doing much now though.

Well if you're not going to bother with any diagnostics (which is pretty dumb IMO)have you got another desktop pc? If yes take the hard drive out of the HP and connect it to the other computer then run chkdsk /f /r.

I think there's quite a bit of this happening at the moment. My local PC shop says there have been some Microsoft upgrades that have caused it (but I'm not convinced). It happened to me and I had to re-install windows.

Her indoors' laptop has recently started 'hanging' after you log in. You then have to hold the power off, until it shuts down and it generally is fine on the second attempt.

I am wondering whether it's some kind of 'update' from windows that's messed things up.

Before running a restore, can you get the machine to a command prompt? If so run CHKDSK c: /r and cross your fingers.

Okay sorry to bring this up again. I've not had much time to look at this since it crashed and I've now got an xp sp2 disc from our it guys in work – which was very kind of them. What do I need to do now – change the set up to boot from disc?