Hi all!...I am new to the board and want to start of saying thank you for this great product. I have already successfully utilized the password reset feature on a computer that the password was lost for, which saved a big hassle for me. I was then trying to help someone who made a registry change and after that, windows would not start properly. It would start logging on and then log straight off. Anyway, I booted with the UBCD4WIN in the hope of uses one of the registry repair programs but for some reason the boot cd would not completely go into the GUI. It would get to the choose environment dialog box. Auto,custom etc. etc. but it just sits there appearing to load. The little sand timer is there but it never goes anywhere. If I hit the drop down box at the very moment it first shows, I can select one of the other choices and hit start or ok but it does the same thing - hang. When I used it fort he password reset, it just automatically loaded without any problems, so wonder what might be causing it not to start and how I can get around it? Thanks in advance for your help.

How about providing some details about the machine that will not boot into UBCD4WIN.
Do you have enough memory?

well it was a gateway, don't have the model details to hand, but it came and was running with XP, so running UBCD4WIN should not have been an issue for computer specs. 2ghz + with at least 256mb of RAM if you want specifics, which according to the minimum requirements is more than enough. So based on the symptoms I previously described can you help diagnose/resolve the issue?

What you are describing sounds memory related, as in a bad stick. Try running memtest86 from the multiboot menu on the system to rule out memory.
Second to that would be overclocked settings in the bios which are not friendly to any PE environment. Reset the BIOS settings to factory default and test again.


Without exact hardware details, there is not much more anyone will be able to add. I would certainly check the fans and make sure the inside is getting enough airflow to keep the operating temp within specs.

Just an FYI: UBCD is a DOS based boot disk. This is UBCD4WIN and is a completely different projecct, so lets not add to the confusion by using the wrong name.

A corrupted filesystem or bad hard drive can also make it hang at that stage so I would run chkdsk from NTFS4Dos or the recovery console (both can be accessed from the initial multiboot menu) then try booting UBCD4Win again.

Yea, this one threw me a few times, watch out for it!

Sometimes it can be a corrupted pagefile causing the problem.

If you still can't get the ubcd4win to boot on this PC I would try one of the live linux distro's like Knoppix, most now have ntfs support so you should be able to view the hdd and recover any data.

If none of these boot then it will be a hardware problem.