Rebooting looping Win Xp Machines

[nuttygeek]

We have around 20 Stone Pc's with Windows XP pro all on a constant reboot they load windows up to just before the log on box and then reboot again. The only thing that has change to them recently is installing ghost client from the the ghost console, after recently having to rebuilding the ghost server. I have tryed to run the xp cd recovery with no luck. Safe mode dosent work either? I doubt that its a virus. Its ghost 7.5 corp.

 

Has anybody come across this before and have a solution?

 

Thanks in advance Nuttygeek

 

p.s. remember channel 4 9pm IT crowd tonight should be good.

[Geoff]

Boot up into the recovery console and run 'chkdsk'

[mac_shinobi]

Cant you press F8 and then there should be an option not to auto start ( that will give you a chance to see any stop errors ) which in turn will let you write them down and research the stop error or post back here

[pooley]

Use winternals type cd and stop everything thats due to startup.

 

Maybe worth using the latest knoppix compilation and doing a virus scan just in case

[_Bob_]

To have twenty machines all go at once is a bit weird but we have some stone machines that came with dodgy hard drives (fujitsu i think). Apparently there was a whole dodgy batch of them sold before anyone realised. Anyway when the hard drive is about to die this is exactly the what will happen with ours. Stone are obviously aware of the situation so they have always come straight out and replaced them, though the warranty must be well expired by now.

[ChrisH]

You would have hoped Fujitsu gave up making hard disks after that fiasco with disks the the model or serial starting with "mpg" about 3-4 years ago. I got sick of doing callouts on them things.

[Guest]

Silly question, but have you tried safemode? Had this prob due to VGA drivers.

 

Could also be a HDD fault. Had some NS Optimum PCs which kept rebooting, turned out to be damaged HDDs

[john]

They tend to cycle when its a hardware fault, or a duff install of windows, and the fact you say you ghosted them could mean there is a common fauly in windows which is why they are all having a problem

[tosca925]

Bloody fujitsu........................!

 

I have had this problem on randon machines around the school. They work fine for waht could be months or even over a year, then the problem you described starts. I try to reimage them and they fail, I cahneg the hard drive for a new one and allis ok again soit owuld poin tot a hardware issue. Around three years ago the school purchased a loto f reconditioned Packard Bells and this happens to then more than any other PC.

[MkII]

Could be the HDD has developed a fault on a particular sector so re-imaging doesn't help - what about a repair to write the core files to good sectors? ...if the disks are out of warranty of course.

[Geoff]

They tend to cycle when its a hardware fault, or a duff install of windows, and the fact you say you ghosted them could mean there is a common fauly in windows which is why they are all having a problem

 

If you ghosted them across the network all at once thats quite likely the cause. You should be able to fix them with a reimage. However the fact that they got corrupt points to a network fault.

[Gatt]

Try loading the image again, or on one of them running the Repair Installation of WnXP

[CheeseDog]

Had this problem a while back allthough not on that many machines at the same time.

 

First of all the problem seemed to be fixed some of the time by running chkdsk from the recovery console. (But there is no guarentee and it takes ages)

 

It seemed to be caused by users at the end of the day shutting down by using the power button and holding it down that little bit too long so it powered off before it logged off. (If that makes sense to you)

 

Managed to narrow it down to this as the same PCs alway had the problem so I spyed on the classrooms at the end of the day. Process went like this

 

1) Close down apps

2) Log off

3) Log off process starts

4) Turn off at wall ASAP before computer shuts down

5) Looping reboot in the morning

 

As it was on a CC3 network the problem was logged with RM there response was it was a known problem and Microsoft were looking in to it. (Haven't heard anything back but the problem seemed to go away after educating users, how to turn off a computer)

 

However it showed up again just after SATS last year when the Year 6 monitors swap with Year 5 for turning off PCs at 15:10.

 

Funilly enough it went away after I changed the time on the PSShutdown .bat file to kick in at 15:00 on a 10 min timer with an abort option.

 

I know this might not be off much help to you as regarding a fix, but maybe after installling your new software users got fed up waiting for machines to shutdown and went for the socket on the wall. I'd check out exactly what is happening to the PC when you push out the software.

 

To be honsest due to the non 100% guarantee of the recovery console my machines were just rebuilt as I could walk away and leave them without the wait to get into the recovery console.

[Michael]

@nuttygeek - You say you have 20 machines which have been working ok until recently you installed the ghost client, so I would agree that's the most likely cause.

 

For 20 machines to all develop a hardware fault in a small space of time is very unlikely. Possible causes (if it was a hardware problem) could be a PSU problem, faulty memory, a heat issue or indeed a hard disk problem as already mentioned. In this instance however, I'd say the fault is being caused by the image rollout. The fact you can't get into Safe Mode indicates to me Windows is corrupt or damaged in some form.

 

I would definitely try what Gatt said and repair Windows. This should determine whether the problem is indeed with Windows.

[MkII]

Another consideration... I had an instance once where the ghost image copied over was suddenly 6Gb on the system partition - smaller than the windows install - no idea how that happpened - I presumed my fellow assistant tech messed with the sizes in the ghost confirm screens.

[nuttygeek]

Just for anyone interested i found an anwser in to go to the registry in safe mode to HKEY_Local_machine\software\microsoft\windowsNT\currentversion\Winlogon and to chance the gina.dll value\from C:\Program Files\symantec\ghost\ginastub.dll to C:\Windows\system32\msgina.dll

reboot and wam bam it works!

 

NuttyGeek

[CheeseDog]

Nice I wonder what gets shafted with my machines when they do this?

 

Can't even access safe mode with mine.

 

Not that it's too much of a problem now that users can shutdown a PC properly.