Windows XP can be a funny old sod at times:

Sometimes and for no apparent reason it’ll go wonky even while you boot it up; even if your last session appeared flawless. In a lot of cases this is because it failed to load a driver properly. The result can be a number of things: It could fail to boot with a BSOD during boot-up, it could give you a mal-formed or scrambled picture on the monitor due to having loaded the graphics driver incorrectly, it might boot but not work properly – sometimes followed by a BSOD, or numerous other things.

If this happens then shut it down again in the normal manner, if you can, and try booting it up again. In numerous cases it’ll boot-up properly the next time, and everything will be fine. – But what if the same problem occurs again when you try to boot it again? Well, if it’s happened twice then the probability is that it’ll occur a third time; so it’s time to take action.

This solution works sometimes; other times it doesn’t; but it’s the easiest solution of all, so it’s worth a try before you try anything else: -

Press your computer’s power button to switch it on, and as soon as you do that repeatedly press the F8 key. One of two things should happen after the initial BIOS screen appears, depending upon the motherboard you have fitted inside your box: – (If anyone tries this and gets something else happening then I’d ask you to comment below. Please give details of the motherboard you have fitted, as well as other system spec.s (Including age of system.), and as good a description as you can of what happens.)

Either it’ll open up a boot-menu screen, or it’ll bypass this step and go straight to the next step. If it does open a boot-menu screen, (Primary Hard drive, CD-ROM, Floppy, etc.) we don’t need that, so don’t change anything there, just hit the Esc key, and as soon as you press the Esc key, repeatedly hit F8 again.

The Windows Advanced Options Menu should appear. This is white text on a dark-grey background. The options open to you are: -

In this case we want “Last Known Good Configuration (your most recent settings that worked)”, so use the down and up arrow keys to highlight this line. Press enter¬.

Forget the other options for the time being. In this article we’ll deal with that one only.

On the next screen you’ll see “Please select the operating system to start.”

If you’ve only installed a single installation of Windows XP then your choice will already be highlighted and you just press Enter¬ again. It your machine has on a dual-boot and/or you see more than a single operating system; use the up and down arrow keys to select the operating system that you were just trying to boot into, (Windows XP.) and then press Enter¬.

Windows will start to boot; except this time it looks in the System Volume Information folders on your hard-drive for a setting it used before when that driver loaded correctly. If it finds it then it’ll load it into the boot sequence and proceed with boot. If it doesn’t and still encounters the problem then the crash that happened before will probably happen again. – But that’s another article’s reading from that point.

**In light of the paragraph above I’m going to make this a series: This post being Part 1, Parts 2 onward to be written soon.**

- This operation thus far may solve your problem, and then again it might not.

If it does solve the problem then I suggest that you allow the computer to fully boot, and then restart it again, just so that the new settings that work are written to the registry before you do anything else.

Coming up in Part 2: If that didn’t work then we’ll use the Windows Advanced Options Menu to do something else. – Coming soon.