serious problem with my mame box!!! help!

[hulkster]

okay, i have been following one of the tutorials on here on how to mask windows.  i got rid of the status messages and i recently changed my boot background to 0 0 0 in the registry.  this morning i turned it on and it took forever to boot into mamewah.  i did some searching on the board and i found this

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=45930.0

seems like this was happening to me as well....the long boot up.  however, i turned it off, and then came back to it and now it hangs and i cant boot into mamewah.  i get to the windows xp loading screen, and after thats done it goes black and sits there.  like nothing is happening.  ive tried to boot into safe mode, but when it starts loading all the drivers (you know when all the text starts rolling on the screen) it freezes after like 15 lines of text.  the num lock light goes out on the keyboard and i cant do a ctrl alt del.  whats the deal?  i have guests coming over tomorrow for the super bowl and i need to have it working!  help!!

[hulkster]

okay it finally came up, but i think i'm having the same problem that guy in that link.  im afraid to go messing around too much as my guests will be here tomorrow night.  anyone have any sure fire suggestions?

[hnugz]

try running the windows recovery option off of the winxp cd.  put it in, boot to the cd, and then run recovery console or whatever.

what all did you change from the time it was working to the next time?  only the 0 0 0 in the registry?

You could also try running last known good configuration if you have that option from the boot menus.

[hulkster]

well i tried that, but it still takes forever to boot.  i mean, it eventually comes up and i get back in to windows, but it takes a while for it to come up the first time.

[Fat_Trucker]

Try booting into safe mode and choose the step by step option. You should be able to see each component and driver loading individually and identify whats causing the problem.

[kelemvor]

If this box just runs mame, might be faster to just reload windows than try to troubleshoot it...

I have Windows on C and everything else (Mame, Roms, etc) on D so killing C is no big deal.

Will probably even make an image of C after a fresh load and update so reloading will be even faster.