Can't access user profiles

[SebastianCassten]

Hello,

My computer uses Windows XP service pack 3 as its operational system. I recently uninstalled McAffe antivirus. Afterward I did a reboot and everything seemed a usual until the light blue screen appeared. It took over five minutes for the system to load the user profiles. When I selected a profile I again waited a couple of minutes, until the background image for the specific profile (but nothing else) appeared. Finally I waited for a quarter of an hour only to witness the computer doing a reboot by itself.

I can't access the computer at all, not even in Safe mode but that is merely because I never get the chance to press F8. After the, I believe it's called, CMOS ROM screen disappears the Windows loading screen appears directly. This has always been the case.

Thanks in advance
Sebastian

 

[rclarke250]

You won't see a prompt for the F8 option, after memory counts, and the drives are seen in cmos, start tapping the F8 key, it should go into the safe boot menu. Either way you may be looking at a repair install of windows, as it looks like McAfee messed something up, or you had a virus or something that McAfee tried to take out and that caused the mess.

 

[kjv1611]

Depending upon how you want to handle this and what you have available at your disposal, it sounds like you have 2 "best" options in my opinion:
1. attempt a repair of Windows - boot from Windows CD, and select the 2nd repair option - first one will take you to a DOS screen - so if you are comfortable there, and know the commands and all... or want to look them up, feel free to try that... such as running scandisk - (chkdsk I think, but I'd have to look it up). the 2nd option is more-so automated, b/c it just flat reinstalls the system files, leaving your program and data files intact... you'd still have to reinstall updates, though.

2. Just wipe it clean and reinstall. First backup anything you need to another drive, disk, whatever. If you need it running to back it up, run Ubuntu linux or whatever live distro you might prefer from a "Live CD"... without installing... and find your files via that, copy to USB or whatever. Then wipe the drive, format it... install Windows... updates, drivers, security software... restore your backed up data...