hail dal community i have a problem whenever i try to log in my win xp sp2 it log back out just displaying the desktop momentarily any help would be appriciated cause i dont want to reformat i have a lot of things i dont want to lose i have even tried a repair install to no avail.

Can you get into Safe Mode?

yes but the same thing happens it just goes back to welcome screen

Booting from the XP CD into the Recovery Console has 3 options that might help:

FIXBOOT

FIXMBR

BOOTCFG

If a Repair Install did not help the issue might be on the boot sector which the above commands will try to repair.

If that doesn't work you may need to slave this drive to obtain your data then totally wipe it and start from scratch.

good day jephree sorry for my slow reply i was using a net cafe i have tried all the above mentioned options in recovery console but still no help could you please detail to me how to obtain data after slaving the drive

After installing the drive as a slave in a working computer you should be able to access the data and transfer it to the working computer or DVD/CD etc.

If you get any Access Denied issues see this:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308421

thanks jephree i did just that (with a dl dvd) and i reformatted so now am up and running again. ibelieve though the problem originated from me using a utility called jv16 power tool and it seem like i deleted files associated with the boot sector and i could not get system restore to work. any guide lines on how to use the app?

I am familiar with the registry cleaner but not the rest of the power tools.

If you were using the cleaner then only remove green entries.

Here is a good backup if you intend to clean the registry:

http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/

Of course if you lose the ability to boot it is difficult to restore from anything.

JV16 Macecraft have their own forum you might check out:

http://www.macecraft.com/phpBB2/index.php

There are less intrusive cleaners if you just want a general cleaning. I will post my canned registry cleaning post after this post.

The Registry is constantly changing as you use your computer. Many temporary settings are recorded so having a recurrence of errors is not uncommon. Rather it is common. Unused file extensions or MRU entries will always recur.

That being said: the first time that you ever use a cleaner you will probably get several hundred hits.

If you cleanup regularly you will always find some.

Cleaners vary on how deep they dig.

I use this freeware which is a moderate digger:

RegSeeker

A deep digger is jv 16 PowerTools

The current version needs to be purchased but you can still get the old freeware version here:

http://www.oldversion.com/program.php?n=jv16

Before using any cleaner you should back up your registry.

ERUNT is a great free tool for that:

[ERUNT] Registry Backup and Restore for Windows
http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/


[ERUNT Download URLs]
http://www.aumha.org/downloads/erunt.zip
http://www.aumha.org/downloads/erunt-setup.exe


[Installing & Using ERUNT]
http://www.winxptutor.com/regback.htm
http://www.silentrunners.org/sr_eruntuse.html
http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-on...runt/erunt.txt


Hope this helps.

many thanks again jephree all this info was so helpful i think i was too hasty on using the cleaner and i did not back up my registry which was a stupid thing to do but thanks again for the help i have learned my lesson well.