Pc refuses to boot, quick blue screen then it loops back

Hey guys a friend brought his computer over saying he had some virus issue on one of his hard drives. Before he brought it over, he claimed it worked (meaning it booted into xp) Now when im trying to do it, it refuses to boot, it comes up with the usual options of safe mode safe mode with networking etc. However selecting any of these options just causes the computer to reset and go back to Post memory checking n such. If i select start windows normally a quick blue screen comes up and then resets. its too quick to get any error code like a quick flash and then just loops.
Any ideas?

Northernsoul55 said:

Hi Major,

If you cannot enter Safe-mode, this maybe Hardware related or possibly a boot sector virus.
Booting issues and start up problems, problems with retrieving data, computer performance
instability etc are symptoms of Boot sector viruses.

Check for any viruses: Windows Defender Offline

This tutorial may help for a XP repair if it is not a virus causing issues:

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/operatingsystems/ss/instxprepair1.htm

Are you able to enter the BIOS without issue?


Hope this helps.

Cheers

Dave

Found the issue earlier, despite it trying to boot from master or something apparently the hard drive that has windows installed was a slave, just changed the HDD priories, i cant believe the guys still using IDEs... anyways im doing spybot S&D and AVG scans just to get rid of anything that may have affected his PC. Also i cant seem to fix the double click a local disk and search appears issue, i did that register shell command and it still happens. im thinking there is at least 1 virus on this computer

Northernsoul55 said:

Ahhh good news, so it was hardware related. :)

Do you mean the Local Disk Opens with Search instead of Explorer?

The command you tried, did you run as administrator?
Was this the command you used: regsvr32 /i shell32

cheers

Dave

cheers

Dave

yeah that command didnt seem to work