Can't boot into Windows

[guardiantau]

Save me! First time poster here, apologies if this was posted in the wrong thread. I'm in a certain harsh situation right now with my computer. I find myself to be fairly fluent with PC's, teaching myself everything pretty much, but right now this is something that I, along with countless hours throughout forum threads, can't seem to fix. Heres my system in a nutshell-

ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe Mobo
Nvidia 7800GT card
1 gig ram
AMD Athlon 3500+ processor
1st SATA WDC WD5000KS-00MNB0
2nd SATA WDC WD2500KS-00MJB0, not using a RAID controller

all updated firmware for everything...


The story - My system has been running, for the most part, flawlessly ever since i built it about 7 months ago, minus a couple drawbacks. I had been doing some routine downloading/multitasking, nothing out of the ordinary..until my computer freezes entirely and i reboot, but this time i cannot even get to the loading screen. What I am stumped on is that when i start up, my system recognizes both hard drives, yet never gets to any other screen after my POST screen.

The overall problem right now, is that Windows (XP, SP2) does not boot whatsoever. I CAN access my BIOS, but right before the Windows loading screen I get random characters, along with absurd colors, flashing on my screen. This is scaring me at the moment, because this has never happened before and apparently no one else I could find had a similar problem. I have used my boot disk of XP to repair my main disk (my 500 gig WD drive) along with installing a fresh version on my previous drive i thought was corrupted (a 250 gig WD drive)
I have also done a large list of things I could come up with out of my own knowledge along with the recommendations from other users on these boards/other forums including -
-physically going inside my computer and checking connections of everything
-running WD hard drive diagnostics
-countless Windows system repairs with the boot disk
-used BIOS availability to change power management, thinking something was wrong there...also changed BIOS back to defaults after all of this
-changed my HDD access mode from Auto to Large (which had previously remedied my problem of not having my OS load, not sure if it ended up corrupting anything)
- run all variants of CHKDSK on both drives, said that it "found and corrected errors" but it doesnt seem that way
- also ran FIXBOOT and FIXMBR commands, to no avail at the moment

I have gotten through the normal windows installation routine, but when my computer automatically restarts after the install/repair it goes back to the strange colors. what is going on, and what could the cause be?

the only thing left that i think is the problem is that something with my partition was corrupted during the initial freeze. is there a way to find out/fix without doing another disk format? I have VERY valuable data on my drive that i need to back up. PLEASE any help would be appreciated. everything was fine until a couple nights ago and i just want everything back to normal :dead:

Moderator Edit: I changed the title of your thread. Please use descriptive thread titles. Thank you.

 

[sghiznaneck]

Do you have another video card that you can try in your computer?? If not, do you have a friend that you can try your current video card in their rig??

 

[DonNagual]

Another high possibility is your PSU. What make is it?

If you by chance have another PSU you can swap to help troubleshoot, that's the first thing I'd do.

 

[Sjbrand99]

I think that it may be to do ith power... im goin on this by the colours. Pc's can get a certain way on faulty power but need more to load. What PSU have you got? What voltages are you running on?

Also... are you sure that you have not Overhaeted or fried your CPU?? Have you overclocked?

 

[guardiantau]

My PSU is a 500W that came with my case, shown here all with default power settings, and just my luck I dont have either a different PSU or video card to test. Also I've been running all my stuff stock since I've gotten it, so no overclocking also. I'm completely stumped Any other ideas? I'm starting to drift towards another reformat but i realllllllllllllllly don't want to do that.

 

[guardiantau]

okay, after running all those tests i finally managed to get the computer to boot. Here's the catch - 50% of the time when i try to boot i get the insane colored characters where it's supposed to boot...the other half of the time it works. And, when I actually get onto my system...theres no sound whatsoever. Same drivers/setup as before....I don't know where I should start to fix this sort of thing. I've already tried reinstalling my nforce chipset drivers and reinstalling my sound card drivers/enabling my onboard...nothing works. What the hell is going on here?

 

[DonNagual]

Aspire has a terrible reputation for their low quality power supplies they put in their cases. That is my first guess as to what is causing your problems.