A friend had me wipe out their drive and reinstall XP. I wiped it out using fdisk. Then, I wiped it out a 2nd time with killdisk from a boot cd. I went into the bios and made sure the boot sequence was right to boot off the XP cd. I've done this numerous times before. I put a 64 bit ed. xp cd into the drive, and it said the proc. can't handle 64 bit, please insert another windows cd. So I said "ok" put in an XP home cd, rebooted and it freezes at the "DELL" bootscreen. It also cuts off the power to my keyboard so I can't enter the BIOS to check the settings. When I turn the power on the power lights indicate everything is on, then the keyboard power just cuts off. I opened the case and everything seems to be terminated correctly. My only guess is that the Killdisk utility wiped out the keyboard drivers or something. Do I have to set this drive as a slave and boot into it from another OS? Duecey

Have you tried using the six floppy disks available from Microsoft to install your XP? Go to;http://kadaitcha.cx/startup_disks.html and to get the download area of what you need.

Well, it won't help at the moment because the bios is set to boot from the cd and not the floppy, but I'm removing the CMOS battery and clearing the NVRAM. Duecey

IT'S A DELL. Where is the dell recovery cd?? Give a person a fish, they eat for a day. Suggest they internet search and they learn a skill for a lifetime.

Won't do any good. PC freezes after the initial "Dell" bootscreen. No time to boot from a cd, floppy, or access the bios. POST doesn't even give beeps. Reset the CMOS battery and cleared the NVRAM. Didn't give me the option to change my bios setting which is strange. I left the battery out for approx. 15-20 mins. with PC unplugged. Grrrrrrrrrrrr! Duecey

Well Duecey4, Your System should have some Diagnostic LED's at the back of the comp which should tell you what the problem is... Incase if it is getting stuck at the Dell Logo, i would suggest to unplug all the External Devices (like any USB Devices) and then clear the NVRAM and then try the reinstallation again... Hopefully it Helps, Nick My PC never Crashes nor does it have Bugs - It just develops random Features at times.

Nick, I didn't read your post in time, but you were right. I took everything out, all cards, the ram chips, etc. Put them all back in and it booted succesfully. I guess the PC just needed a refresh of it's hardware. Thanks for the posts. Duecey