Hey guys long time no see. I always come here when I am stumped and I am always helped, for this I can't thank you enough! So I do like modern operating systems and recently set my parents up with Windows 8.1 and it is awesome, however my personal computer is a Dell XPS-400 with XPSP3 with 3GHz processor, 2GB ram, 320GB hard drive and nvidia gforce6800 that I paid dearly for when I got done with college in 2006 and am still inlove with it. I have every thing exactly how I like it and it still does everything I want. I also have an iPhone 4S from when they first came out in 2011 that works great and I still love(but planning to do a new battery next fall at the 4 year mark) and i still purposely run ios6.1.3 on. I just have always had a hard time letting go of thigs i treasured and researched before purchasing till I have to, for this I apologize as I do realize I'm behind the times. Ok so something very odd happened twice in the last 3 weeks and it doesn't match what my search has turned up. I read through various posts of similar problems to see if I could spare you guys this post but felt the need to explain better. By the way I recently purchased Acronis True Image (about a year ago) and cloned my hard drive to a fresh identical OEM Western Blue 320GB and also made a full image on an external seagate and boot disc just incase. I did this after a error check/defrag/cleanup session and when she was in her prime (the day XP support ended actually, then redid when they let through that final extra fix) This was my zero day protection lol. I run Norton Antivirus also as a few years ago I abandoned the original McAfee when it started giving me trouble. Ok here's how it went down.
About 3 wks ago I had Norton pop up it that it had successfully quarantined an intrusion attempt (can't recall the details but it took it about a minute to work but reported successful removal). This happened while Mozilla Firefox was trying to update but I figured all was fine and shut down without trying anything. The following night I turned on the comp and walked away to give her time to boot then came back to a black screen and a white responsive cursor. I said oh boy probably needs rebooted. I tapped the power button and got no response. So I held the power button till power was cut. I then powered her back up. That first black screen (bios screen? Sorry I'm amateur lol) which says press F2 etc came up then the colored screen saying starting Windows XP! I though sweet! No issues. Next the screen went black but rather than the desktop coming up within a few seconds up came a white cursor and there I was in a panic! I repeated twice more with same results. "Windows XP starting" changes to a black screen with a responsive white cursor. So I tried again and stopped her with F8 and chose safe mode. Same problem black screen with responsive cursor. Repeated again and chose boot from Last Known Good Configuration and it worked perfectly!! Everything was back to normal! Working perfectly fully functional so I shut down and rebooted normally and got black screen and responsive moveable cursor again :-(. Hard rebooted again and hit F8 and booted from Last Known good config. Went to system restore and chose a restore point of the day before. It went through the restore but failed and said unable to complete restore and went to the black screen and cursor again in same pattern after "starting windows xp". Being persistent I repeated 3 more times going back a few days farther each time and had no success. Restore would not work. So I rebooted again with Last Known Good Config., then created a restore point of that, then restored to it. Viola! Perfection it worked perfectly and computer would bow boot on its OEM with complete functionality as normal. But thats when i noticed Mozilla Firefox would not run, as soon as I clicked the icon it said "bootlog not found" or something along those lines. So I uninstalled and re downloaded it and the. It worked perfectly and the comp was back to normal at last! Over two weeks passed with perfect boots each night. Then lastnite... I came to the same issue again after probably 15 successful boots! So after two hard shut downs, I immediately repeated my successful fix of going to Last Known Good Config, making a fresh restore point and restoring to that. It worked and now all is well again except I'm pretty worried if there is an underlying hardware issue or something corrupt in the software.
My question therefore is what is causing this and why did it happen again? I haven't dug out my OEM windows disc or any of my Acronis arsenal i made last spring after XP support ended, but have those if I need too. I am hoping that by bringing the issue to the forum now I will be able to prevent anything worse from occurring before it does. I'd love any input I truly appreciate all you time and expertise and want to thank you guys very much ahead of time! And thanks for reading my post, I'm sorry it was so long I just try to be very detailed from the start.
Thanks Again,
Yours,
Mike T
About 3 wks ago I had Norton pop up it that it had successfully quarantined an intrusion attempt (can't recall the details but it took it about a minute to work but reported successful removal). This happened while Mozilla Firefox was trying to update but I figured all was fine and shut down without trying anything. The following night I turned on the comp and walked away to give her time to boot then came back to a black screen and a white responsive cursor. I said oh boy probably needs rebooted. I tapped the power button and got no response. So I held the power button till power was cut. I then powered her back up. That first black screen (bios screen? Sorry I'm amateur lol) which says press F2 etc came up then the colored screen saying starting Windows XP! I though sweet! No issues. Next the screen went black but rather than the desktop coming up within a few seconds up came a white cursor and there I was in a panic! I repeated twice more with same results. "Windows XP starting" changes to a black screen with a responsive white cursor. So I tried again and stopped her with F8 and chose safe mode. Same problem black screen with responsive cursor. Repeated again and chose boot from Last Known Good Configuration and it worked perfectly!! Everything was back to normal! Working perfectly fully functional so I shut down and rebooted normally and got black screen and responsive moveable cursor again :-(. Hard rebooted again and hit F8 and booted from Last Known good config. Went to system restore and chose a restore point of the day before. It went through the restore but failed and said unable to complete restore and went to the black screen and cursor again in same pattern after "starting windows xp". Being persistent I repeated 3 more times going back a few days farther each time and had no success. Restore would not work. So I rebooted again with Last Known Good Config., then created a restore point of that, then restored to it. Viola! Perfection it worked perfectly and computer would bow boot on its OEM with complete functionality as normal. But thats when i noticed Mozilla Firefox would not run, as soon as I clicked the icon it said "bootlog not found" or something along those lines. So I uninstalled and re downloaded it and the. It worked perfectly and the comp was back to normal at last! Over two weeks passed with perfect boots each night. Then lastnite... I came to the same issue again after probably 15 successful boots! So after two hard shut downs, I immediately repeated my successful fix of going to Last Known Good Config, making a fresh restore point and restoring to that. It worked and now all is well again except I'm pretty worried if there is an underlying hardware issue or something corrupt in the software.
My question therefore is what is causing this and why did it happen again? I haven't dug out my OEM windows disc or any of my Acronis arsenal i made last spring after XP support ended, but have those if I need too. I am hoping that by bringing the issue to the forum now I will be able to prevent anything worse from occurring before it does. I'd love any input I truly appreciate all you time and expertise and want to thank you guys very much ahead of time! And thanks for reading my post, I'm sorry it was so long I just try to be very detailed from the start.
Thanks Again,
Yours,
Mike T