I'm freshly installing Windows xp home edition on a computer i just formated. After it finishes the dos part of the installation process it reboots and it says its configuring my hardware, then that its starting up windows. Thats when i get the blue screen of death. It says "...encountered and problem and is shutting down windows to prevent damage to your computer. Check for viruses, remove new hard drives, run chkdsk..." and all that other stuff. Why is this happening? How do I fix it? I've checked the bios and everything looks to be in good shape. I reset the bios back to default just in case. If i set the bios to halt on no errors will that work, if so, when this message says to prevent damage to my computer, what kind of damage does it mean. Why doesnt the screen tell you what problem has been encountered? Bah, this is very frustrating. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance

You need to strip your PC down to it's bare essentials (keyboard, mouse, hard drive, one stick of RAM, grafix card (unless you have onboard grafix, in which case leave the grafix card out)). Take out all other unnecessary hardware/peripherals. See how you go from there, if all is good, add your h/ware back piece by piece, testing as you go, when and if your PC falls over, you know which piece of h/ware is causing the problem.

Alright i stripped it down. All it has in it now is the dvdrom, the a drive, the graphics card and a bus card. Its still not working though.

Hmmmm, try disabling any cacheing and/or shadowing options in your BIOS..........

Also, is your BIOS up 2 date? search the net for a possible patch.

Check THIS link out, could well be of some use.......

Disable the virus check in the bios.