My laptop freezes during boot. I have a Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop. When booting under Windows XP, it freezes on the "Starting Windows XP..." screen. This happens every time I boot my computer and the freeze seems to occur on the same place every time. I'm able to access the BIOS menu just fine. I've tried hitting F8 during Windows XP boot to boot into Safe Mode, Safe Mode w/ Command Prompt, etc. and each of them freeze during boot. I believe this is a result of my computer overheating. Just before this started, I closed my laptop expecting it to go into standby. Stupidly, I put it into my laptop bag without checking to be sure that it had completely entered the standby state. When I opened my bag a faw hours later, the laptop fan was blowing and the bottom of the laptop was almost too hot to touch. After removing the laptop from my bag and allowing it to cool, I tried starting it and first encoutered the error I describe. I have not been able to boot Windows XP successfully since. I've also tried booting using the Dell Resource CD that came with my computer and it displays the following text and freezes: ================================================== Starting Windows 98... Microsoft RAMDrive version 3.06 virtual disk C: Disk size: 32,767k Sector size: 512 bytes Allocation unit: 32 sectors Directory entries: 64 SAMSUNG CD/DVD-ROM Device Driver, Rev M2.40 (C)Copyright SAMSUNG Electronics Co., Ltd. 1998 ( http://www.sec.samsung.co.kr ) Device Name : MCSD000[freeze] ================================================== In the text above, the underscore following MSCD000 represents the blinking cursor. I've tried booting Linux bootable CDs such as Knoppix and Gentoo and they fail on boot as well. Here's what is displayed when I boot from a Knoppix bootable CD: ================================================== Unknown bridge resource 2: assuming transparent Welcome to the KNOPPIX live Linux-on-CD! Accessing KNOPPIX CDROM at /dev/scd0... Total memory found: 645476 kB Creating /ramdisk (dynamic size=508776k) on /dev/shm...Done. Creating directories and symlinks on ramdisk...Done. Starting init process. INIT: version 2.78-knoppix booting Processor 0 is Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 Mobile CPU 1.60GHz 1196MHz, 512 KB Cache APM Bios found, power management functions enabled. [freeze] ================================================== Here's what is displayed when I boot from a Gentoo bootable CD: ================================================== ...lots of boot information... >> Loading modules... :: Scanning for uhci...[freeze] ================================================== I have been able to successfully boot the tomsrtbt bootable Linux CD (http://www.toms.net/rb/) and get a command prompt. I've tried running the memtest application that comes with the Gentoo and Redhat boot disks and it runs successfully and displays no errors. I've removed the hard drive from my laptop and attached it to my PC using an IOGEAR hard drive enclosure to test its integrity. Scandisk reported no errors. Any advice on what might be causing this and where to check next? Thanks! -- Matt