I've been facing a peculiar problem on Windows XP. My Compaq Presario 2800T Laptop hangs during the Windows logon screen (with the green indicator on the status bar scrolling repeatedly from left to right without any indication of the hard-disk being accessed. I tried restarting with the 'Last known good configuration' too... same problem ! On trying the 'Safe mode' boot option, the drivers get loaded till AGP440.sys and then the system hangs.... I thought I'd try to re-install the OS... On using the Win XP OS CD, I get to the point where the screen asks me to make a choice between 'New' setup of Windows XP or 'Repair' of the existing installation... Choosing either of them takes me to a blue screen which reads "Examining 28086 MB drive at disk(0) id(0) on atapi...." and then the system hangs !!! Being unable to use the 'Repair' option meant that I could not access the Recovery console either ! I thought that maybe the partition table got corrupted.... I used a Win ZP start-up disk to boot my system (without hard-disk access) and used Active@ Partition Recovery to verify the partition info... the partition table seems fine ! Can someone help me out please ??? I've tried all the options that I could think of. I've reached a dead-end !

If you're going to reinstall the OS, connect the laptop to another machine and drag off your data, then FDISK the drive and boot from the CD and do a clean install. And have you tried booting in Safe Mode (hit F8 during startup)??? It sounds to me like you have corrupted video drivers, although with the things you did afterwards it may be more than that now. Maybe start a new post and ask what you'd like to do, reformat, fix the problems, etc...

Thanks for your response, Lucid ! I've tried all the PF8 options.... They didn't work. If it were corrupted video drivers alone, Safe mode would have worked. I'm wondering if its an MBR corruption. Sadly, FDISK wouldn't help, as I have an NTFS hard-disk ! I'm very interested in knowing how I could connect my laptop to another m/c say a laptop. Would a normal network cable suffice to connect the two notebooks ? How would the network recognise my drive if I am not able to boot my m/c properly ? Any suggestions ? The best I can do is use a floppy and boot the system with no hard-disk access. Will the other m/c recognise the hard-disk even in such a case ?

I've been able to solve my problem. I've been through hell to fix my comp and shall gladly help anyone who has a similar problem...