I've just had my PC (E6600 + P5W DH Deluxe) shipped from overseas, and it fails to boot. It will boot to Safe Mode, but in normal mode, it will hit the XP load screen, and then the screen goes blank and nothing further happens. In the F8 windows boot menu, the characters are corrupt, with letters replaced incorrectly. This led me to believe it was a corrupt hard drive, but i disconnected the hard drive and let the computer boot up and the "Disk Read Error" message also had corrupt characters. I've successfully updated the BIOS and checked the RAM. Many thanks in advance.

Did you then immediately enter the BIOS screens and reset values as necessary? If this is the case and the POST screens are still corrupted then it sounds like there was some type of ESD (ElectroStaticDischarge) event. If you had the computer insured I would place a claim. You could run a memory check using memtest86. Also reseat ALL cards, cables and RAM.

I've seen this happen with bad RAM or RAM slots. Do as suggested in the last reply and test the RAM. WinSimple Software