How To Restart After Computer Hangs

17 October 2008

IntroductionThe computer just hanged. This article will try to offer some help step by step.

What can be wrong?
Restart the computer. If one can hear a soft and short beep sound, most likely the computer's hardware is working fine. The master boot record or boot files or the Registry of the XP's operating system may be corrupted.

What are the Usual Ways?
Usually, users will re-install the complete XP system. Some will choose to reformat the hard disk. One would lose all the personal documents, program files and other 3rd party programs. This article will describe a method that will not only save time for the restoration but also avoid having to reinstall all other programs.

What's Required?
a) A good working hard disk;
b) XP installation disk

How to?
Step 1 Suspect Faulty Master Boot Record or the Boot Files Follow the instructions in this article to repair the master boot record and the boot files and restart the computer. If the computer still hangs, then

Step 2 Suspect Faulty RegistryCopy the 5 files, namely: system, security, software, sam and default files from the “repair” sub folder to “config” sub folder in Windows and restart the computer to enter the safe mode. This Microsoft site gives the detailed instructions.

Thereafter:

a) If you have a Registry Backup copyFollowing this article to restore the Registry files from the backup copy and restart

b) If you do not have a Registry Backup Copy
Continue to follow the instructions given by Microsoft and restore the 5 files from a special “System Volume Information” folder. This folder is normally hidden from view. The system files are stored in this special folder when XP's System Restore is working. Note that the files in the folder may contain viruses as System Restore does not check for viruses when it stores the files.

Related articles
1. How to Restore Corrupted Registry
2. How to backup and restore Registry files
3, How to repair faulty Master Boot Record and Boot files