The Dell Dimension 4700 with XP PRO worked reliably for 4 years. The Dell Windows XP PRO disk was lost so on a crash, a bootleg copy of XP PRO was installed. System worked great for 2 week then just went blank. Now I can boot up BIOS. It shows all devices are fine but will not load Windows. Windows logo never shows up. The screen just went black. I tried F2 and F12 but it would not boot from CD ROM or HDD. Following advice in this forum, I hit F8, it gave me a bunch of Windows boot options. I chose SAFE MODE. The computer freezes at that SAFE MODE option screen. It woud not boot or went back to the multiple XP boot choice again. The XP PRO disk was reordered from DELL for $10.88. Will be here in a few days. Please help me boot from CD ROM,otherwise the DELL disk is also a dead option. Many thanks.

So F12 shows the device list, where to select the boot drive? When you select the CDROM or DVD and it did not boot from that drive, maybe your CDROM has a problem. Sometimes cleaning the laser carefully will help on that. Please send a reply, if you solved the problem !!!

... enter your bios and alter the boot order to cdrom\dvd to "first" ... save and exit ...for Dell tap either "del" key @ boot-up ...OR/ .... F1.... F3...... F12 key ...varies on model Grrrr "...pentathol makes you sing like a canary" http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/... ... got brain freeze

BIOS boots up. All devices present and status checked out OK. XP PRO will not boot from HDD or CD ROM. All drives were working before that. I think the bootleg XP PRO locked the system up. My sincerest apologies to Mr. Bill Gate Jr... Please advise any way to boot XP PRO from anything.

OKOK It really helped when I put the XP PRO disk into the correct drive :=). Windows now can boot from CD ROM #1. Many thanks to the bros for their quick support and encouragement. I would recommend this forum to all PC users. To reciprocate for the bros' generous support, I will take some time and post easy do-it-yourself fixes to PEACHTREE hang ups. PEACHTREE would regularly hang up at every PC, server or network hickups, erasing critical accounting data. It used to give me sleepless nights and gray hair. Each hang up costs about $750 data recovery per occurence. So it should help a lot of poor people from getting poorer and improving their accounting data integrity. Many thanks to the bros for their quick suggestions.

I am glad you got it up and running but you still have an overlooked problem. The original crash an the second crash. I doubt the bootleg copy was the problem on the second crash. I would check the hd for errors and the memory. Happy computing. :-)

OK. You have a good point. Loaded the XP PRO from Dell. The disk formatted the HD drive and installed from scratch. Computer works but if left overnight it crashes. The error message in ASCII said "... a critical process was terminated... Windows had to shut down to prevent damages to the computer... Check new hardwares and softwares...Disable cashing or shadowing...Beginning dump of physical memory..." It did it 3 nights, every night. I took out the modem and addon SDRAM cards, vacumm dust out of the CPU heat sink etc... It still crashed. Did any bro or sis have the same problem? Any pointer to info to fix??? Thanks a lot.