Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

Question

wont boot sometimes

Feb 5, 2013 12:23AM PST

Ok so my computers been acting up and completely freezing a lot and then when i restart it sometimes it won't even boot up and it will just stay a blank screen with a white courser blinking in the corner. And sometimes it'll make it to the gateway logo then freeze ..if im lucky it will actually start up and ill have a working computer for a couple hours (till it freezes again)
Help?

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
Answer
Could be numerous things
Feb 5, 2013 12:33AM PST

How old is your computer? It could be overheating. It could be a failing hard drive. It could be a virus or other malware. It could be failing capacitors on the motherboard. You can check the temps by downloading SpeedFan. Temps under 50 degrees C are good, over 65 a problem, in between bears watching. To check your hard drive, run chkdsk and let it check for bad sectors. To check for malware, boot to Safe Mode and do a full system scan. To check capacitors, remove the cover and look for swollen and/or leaky ones. To check for corrupt system files, go to the command prompt and issue the command: sfc /scannow .

Good luck.

- Collapse -
what now?
Feb 5, 2013 6:32AM PST

Ok well its not the temp or capacitors. I ran chkdsk and found no problems. Now when I did the system scan it said "found corrupt files but was unable to fix some of them" and said the details are in the CBS.log which i went to but it kept saying access denied (even though i'm the system admin)

Next Steps?

- Collapse -
You have to copy that CBS.log file to read.
Feb 5, 2013 6:49AM PST

You have to copy that CBS.log file to read, I guess that's because Windows has it open for writing. So just copy it to another folder and then you can open it in something like Wordpad. I warn you that this file is very cryptic, so don't be surprised if it's hard to dechiper.

Another cryptic log you can check is the system event log. To do that click Start -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Event Viewer. Once in Event Viewer click on the system log and scroll through the entries looking for those flagged "error" to see if you can find hints as to where the problem could be.
`
Good luck.

- Collapse -
I found it, but
Feb 5, 2013 11:24AM PST

Below is what the log says the error is but I feel like its not whats causing all my problems. But ill let someone with a little more computer knowledge than me figure that out.

"2013-02-05 16:44:03, Info CSI 000002e6 [SR] Cannot repair member file [l:24{12}]"settings.ini" of Microsoft-Windows-Sidebar, Version = 6.0.6002.18005, pA = PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE_AMD64 (9), Culture neutral, VersionScope = 1 nonSxS, PublicKeyToken = {l:8 b:31bf3856ad364e35}, Type neutral, TypeName neutral, PublicKey neutral in the store, hash mismatch
2013-02-05 16:44:03, Info CSI 000002e7 Hashes for file member \SystemRoot\WinSxS\amd64_microsoft-windows-sidebar_31bf3856ad364e35_6.0.6002.18005_none_2ce6c04cdc275758\settings.ini do not match actual file [l:24{12}]"settings.ini" :
Found: {l:32 b:ntPb8a3owMmbzl2TXFHogrOTUqnXgzASIdBVmJptaGE=} Expected: {l:32 b:v6OQf2AJO5FVbRBJuIwXxkdkCoOaSk3y0ol6uTH491o=}"