Hi, this is a very new problem that i had ever seen. First, I installed a fresh copy of windows with sp2 on it...worked fine until 3 days later a blue screen came out saying that hardware error and has been shutdown, plese remove it yada yada... So i tried reinstalling a few times and during the process of installing a fresh copy..it keeps saying a file is missing or corrupted...cant be continue.. my friend told me to test my memory and i did..found out one of them isnt working properly... so i was down to 512mb and had no problem installing everything... after installed all the drivers and some applications.. a day later.. it wont even BOOTup to windows, it keeps saying that a file is missing or corrupted but can be fixed by using windows repair. ( windows/system32/config/system ) I did it and it booted to windows but the next time i restart windows, same thing came out.. I did a ram test (got it from microsoft website) and found out both muskin rams came out with many errors. So i tried using my OCz 1gb dual ddr ram and its doing the same thing. I've done lower level formatting on that 6L200pro maxtor hdd before (just bought it from newegg). But now i cant even do low lower formatting anymore and whenever i tried to install freshcopy of windows, its saying that your hard disk is not compatible with windows xp..but u may select the create hard disk with start up files option..which i dont see it.. any ideas?? could it be the hdd is defective as well?? thanks in advance! sam

Personally maxtor is one of the drives on my "stay away from" list, when it comes to HDD's. With that out of the way lets try a few things, first download GWSCAN and MEMTEST and get to work. GWSCAN will zero out any hard drive completely and it will allow you to test the hard drive as well. Even though the drive is new, make sure you still run a test on it. I am not sure what tool you had deployed to test your ram initially but re-test all your sticks wih MEMTEST to be double sure. Once you are done with that and you've ruled out any defective hardware, write zeroes to the drive, repartition and reformat it and you should be good to go. I assume you have a 200GB drive, if you decide to completely zero out every sector it might take a while but there is a shorter option within the menu that works just fine. List of lists

And after all of that think about maybe two partitions or more instead of one huge one. Just a thought. You are using Maxtor's drive overlay software to format? Or no? You can avoid many of these Windows problems with Linux. Linspire eases the transition for new users