Date: 02/25/06 (Computer Help)    Keywords: no keywords

Our power just went out three times within a few minutes. Now my roommate's computer is dead, even though she has a surge protector. At first there was just a bunch of unreadable text and random squares of colour. It was the boot options (safe mode, safe mode with comand prompt, safe mode with networking, last known good config, and restart normally) but it was just a bunch of iiiiis and gggggggs and ooooooos. Anyway, NONE of those options work, and just cause the computer to restart again.

The monitor is now showing things clearly, but it won't do anything but give these options. I tried to put the windows cd rom disc in, but it doesn't recognize it, and won't boot from the disc.

The computer had been having problem with restarting it self and saying it was recovering from a serious error before this, but it would always work fine after that. Also occassionally the monitor would turn black and load a screen that said something like "OUT OF RANGE V: (numbers) H: (numbers)"

Has anyone ever heard of anything like this, or know anything that can help?

Also:

In the last known good configuration, and starting windows normally, it will act like its loading window showing the "WINDOWS XP HOME" screen with the black background and the little blue bar at the bottom...but then it will flash a blue screen with white writing on it. It doesn't stay there for more than a second so its impossible to read what it says, but its English and not gibberish. Then it restarts itself and the whole process starts all over again.

Do you think this is caused by the power failure, or something else?

We have Windows Professional, and Windows Home....but even if it came to reinstalling windows and loosing years worth of personal data, it won't read the disc.

Please if anyone can help at all....please.

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/computer_help/591855.html