i purchased an ibm 390e laptop approximately a month ago. it came with windows me, but i upgraded to xp with a disc the previous owner had included. the computers specifications are (if it matters) 300 mhz pentium II, (2) 256 mb ram sticks, matching, making a total of 512 mb, an 18 gb hd, and various other components i do not think are a factor. now, windows xp had been working fine until march 22nd, when a blue screen popped up out of nowhere, stating irq_not_less_or_equal (or something similar). i figured it was a one time occurence, and rebooted the computer. needless to say, it happened again after about a half hour of use with a different error message, but both times it had to dump the physical memory. things got much worse from there. after those two error messages occured, i attempted to reboot the computer again. it turned on, but did not display the ibm startup screen or anything afterwards. so i unplugged it and tried to restart it about before the ibm screen appeared. well, it appeared, but didnt go any further than that. so i called it a night, and on the 23rd of march, i woke up and turned on the computer, and it worked for about an hour before the blue screen appeared again. i then attempted to restart the computer several times with nothing appearing, such as had happened the day before. then i checked some information online, and one site stated it was possibly the memory sticks being nonworking or mismatched. interestingly, every time i changed the memory sticks around, or took one out and left one in, the computer would start up normally, but the blue screen would appear soon after. after the blue screen would appear, i would attempt to restart the computer with no luck as had occured previously. however, seeing as it booted everytime with the memory in different combinations, id guess its not a problem with the memory. this happened most of last night, and then i woke up this morning, the 24th of march, and attempted to just install windows xp again over the existing installation, as another website had recommended. it froze during the installation. so then i switched out the ram so it would start correctly again, and attempted to format the hard drive and install windows 98, which is my operating system of choice. the computer froze at 54% of drive c: formatted. well, seeing as it keeps freezing during installations and wont start properly all the time, i really do not know what there is left to do. for anyone that has actually read this and has a possible solution, i thank you.

If I understand you correctly, at 54% into the format of the HDD the system froze? It did not state it was trying to recover a file allocation unit or anything? The system just locked up at 54% complete? If so your hard drive might have gone south. If I where you I would visit the below web site.. http://www.storage.ibm.com/hdd/support/download.htm#DFT There you can download the utility to test the HDD. This is just a place to start, it could be something else but not being able to complete a full format is not a good sign. Laters, KTTD

well, after i posted here, the format stopped again at 86% (i tried again). the third time i tried it formatted all the way through, and i was even able to install most of windows 98 before it froze up again. another oddity i have noticed is that if it freezes and i attempt to boot it up immediately after, it usually wont work, but if i wait ten minutes, it will work. im not understanding this at all, and i dont have the cash for a new harddrive so i am hoping it isnt that.