Windows XP won't boot normally, OK in safe mode

Apr 26, 2018
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Long story short:

Windows XP SP3 on Dell XPS 700 will no longer get past the Windows XP logo (stops at around 5 cycles of blue progress bar).

I can boot into safe mode with networking and did a chkdsk /f without problems. All drives show no errors and can be accessed. System time and date are correct.

Booting into "Disable auto-reboot" shows the BSD with the following STOP message:

*** STOP: 0x00000050 (0xCD1D6350, 0x0000001, 0x8052BAA0, 0x00000000)

Can anyone help me get the PC booting up normally? Thanks.
 
Solution
Try to insert the XP cd and perform a repair. You can also try bootrec commands. https://www.digitalcitizen.life/command-prompt-fix-issues-your-boot-records

Aside from that you could try using Hiren's BootCD or my favorite is Boot Repair Disk which can be downloaded from here.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/boot-repair-cd/

Just a side note. XP is no longer safe to use. It is very easy to hack\exploit. I wouldn't even be surprised if this is what caused your issue in the first place. A virus like crypto getting to your system files etc... I would suggest you upgrade.
Try to insert the XP cd and perform a repair. You can also try bootrec commands. https://www.digitalcitizen.life/command-prompt-fix-issues-your-boot-records

Aside from that you could try using Hiren's BootCD or my favorite is Boot Repair Disk which can be downloaded from here.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/boot-repair-cd/

Just a side note. XP is no longer safe to use. It is very easy to hack\exploit. I wouldn't even be surprised if this is what caused your issue in the first place. A virus like crypto getting to your system files etc... I would suggest you upgrade.
 
Solution
I would take that hard drive out and connect it to a computer running Windows 10 with good anti-virus/security protection with an IDE/SATA to USB adapter and run a scan of it as an external drive. Something may have gotten corrupted in the master boot record, and yes, that could very well be a deeply embedded virus. Do *not* install it directly to another PC as an additional internal drive.

And yes, I hope you are using that in offline only. No A/V programs support XP anymore and Microsoft stopped security updates for it years ago.