mcbenton
asked on
win2k logon hangs at "loading your personal settings"
My dell latitude c800 laptop worked fine yesterday. When I tried to boot up this morning the system hung at the win2k pro "Loading your personal settings..." screen.
I tried to boot up in all of the various flavors of "safe mode" but it always hangs in the same place. I would try logging on as a different user, but I have AutoLogon enabled and it is set up to log me in automatically so I don't have a chance to stop it and choose a different user name. I've tried booting up with and without various devices attached (USB Zip drive, and a PCMCIA wireless LAN card), all with the same results. The system responds to the mouse pad and seems to be responding to key presses, but none that I know of can get me past the screen I'm on.
I've run chkdsk from the recovery console on both the c drive (windows partition) and the d drive (data partition). It said it fixed errors on the D drive, but reported no errors on the windows drive.
It appears to be booting normally until it gets to the "loading personal settings" stage. At that point it starts out fine (hard drive light is blinking happily), but after a minute or so the hard drive activity almost completely ceases and the internal fans come on which usually indicates that my processor is working pretty hard. The longest I've left it in this state so far is about 30 or 40 minutes with no apparent change.
I tried booting it up with techw0rm, but techw0rm was not able to enable xms memory, and therefore was stuck with only about 640K to run its utilities with. This wasn't enough to run anything useful.
I thought that if I could delete the AutoAdminLogon registry key then I would be able to log on as a different user, perhaps, and try to discover what the problem is that way. However, I don't know how to edit the registry without first being able to log on, so I'm stuck. I don't recall making any system changes before I powered down last time. It was a pretty routine day of web browsing and Word file editing.
Luckily I regularly backup my data, so I won't lose much if I'm forced to reformat. However, I have two presentations to do tomorrow and don't really have time for that.
One more thing that just occurred to me. I normally connect to the Internet via wireless LAN, either at home or at school, both in infrastructure mode. I have my home ssid set to the same one as school so that it's easy for me to switch between networks. Could this be a source of the problem?
Any suggestions? Thanks in advance!!!
I tried to boot up in all of the various flavors of "safe mode" but it always hangs in the same place. I would try logging on as a different user, but I have AutoLogon enabled and it is set up to log me in automatically so I don't have a chance to stop it and choose a different user name. I've tried booting up with and without various devices attached (USB Zip drive, and a PCMCIA wireless LAN card), all with the same results. The system responds to the mouse pad and seems to be responding to key presses, but none that I know of can get me past the screen I'm on.
I've run chkdsk from the recovery console on both the c drive (windows partition) and the d drive (data partition). It said it fixed errors on the D drive, but reported no errors on the windows drive.
It appears to be booting normally until it gets to the "loading personal settings" stage. At that point it starts out fine (hard drive light is blinking happily), but after a minute or so the hard drive activity almost completely ceases and the internal fans come on which usually indicates that my processor is working pretty hard. The longest I've left it in this state so far is about 30 or 40 minutes with no apparent change.
I tried booting it up with techw0rm, but techw0rm was not able to enable xms memory, and therefore was stuck with only about 640K to run its utilities with. This wasn't enough to run anything useful.
I thought that if I could delete the AutoAdminLogon registry key then I would be able to log on as a different user, perhaps, and try to discover what the problem is that way. However, I don't know how to edit the registry without first being able to log on, so I'm stuck. I don't recall making any system changes before I powered down last time. It was a pretty routine day of web browsing and Word file editing.
Luckily I regularly backup my data, so I won't lose much if I'm forced to reformat. However, I have two presentations to do tomorrow and don't really have time for that.
One more thing that just occurred to me. I normally connect to the Internet via wireless LAN, either at home or at school, both in infrastructure mode. I have my home ssid set to the same one as school so that it's easy for me to switch between networks. Could this be a source of the problem?
Any suggestions? Thanks in advance!!!
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duhhhh I knew that - can't believe I didn't think of it! That will work BigP
ASKER
Thank you so much guys. BigP's suggestion allowed me to get into the system, and then I used shekerra's suggestion to look at the event viewer to figure out what was wrong.
It appears that I was getting errors that fell into the category of stop code 0x00000050 which seems to be some sort of memory referencing error. I'm still not sure as to the ultimate cause. I re-installed win2k in place (i.e. without reformatting the partition) which allowed me to keep my software, but the system is still not entirely stable. Hopefully later this week I'll have time to look at it in more depth.
Again, thank you!!!
It appears that I was getting errors that fell into the category of stop code 0x00000050 which seems to be some sort of memory referencing error. I'm still not sure as to the ultimate cause. I re-installed win2k in place (i.e. without reformatting the partition) which allowed me to keep my software, but the system is still not entirely stable. Hopefully later this week I'll have time to look at it in more depth.
Again, thank you!!!
ASKER
I remembered some other things I tried too. When in the recovery console I read the boot log (ntbtlog.txt) and everything seemed to be okay there. I don't think it's a driver problem.