Everything was working fine untill my pc completely frooze. So I turned it off, i have 2 cd/dvd drives that were unplugged and needed to be plugged back in so did that, and turned her on. Went past the first bit of boot which tells you system info then windows said to the equivilant: "Windows had not been shutdown correctly because of a power loss" and it gave me these options to choose from: 1.safe mode 2.safe mode with networking 3.safe mode with cmd prompt 4.last good know config 5.start windows normally. i have tried all of these and the most i got was a split second flash of a blue screen which i could only make out lots of 00000's and some writing. Could this be a Hard-drive failure because ive tried to go into the XP setup to repair it but will not do that, as far as i have got was to try and install windows 98 and it would not even let me do that, it just hung there for a long time. Any advice? Thanks Jon

tried installing 98 to fix XP? Wow. You sure know how to hurt a OS. Why don't you start by unplugging the cdrom drives and see if you can come up in safe mode. Unless the 98 install messed up the mbr. Then you will be left with going into recovery console and using the utilities fixmbr and fixboot. Golly gee wilerkers everyone. Learn to Internet Search

Why would anyone even think that 1 operating system could be used to fix another totally different operating system?....geez! As wanderer said! and you might try to use the pause button when that blue screen comes up again to record exactly what the error message was..You will need to be fast but it can be done.... IN THE MATTERS OF STYLE, swim with the current; in matters of principle, STAND LIKE A ROCK Visit Computer Vitals For A Pleasant Surprise

How to Perform an In-Place Upgrade (Reinstallation) of Windows XP ------------- RAM Memory test program for downloading: http://www.memtest86.com/ ------------ Possible that the harddrive is not running at its normal speed, freezing up or slowing down. My computer took 20 min. to boot the other day. Mechanical devices do have there problems. Watch to see if harddrive indicator light is doing any rapid blinking.

tried grabbing the pause button at right time but each time restarts as if it doesnt want to stop. can access parts of using dos/win98 setup the HD but wen go into program files i do a dir/p and first one is ok but second 1, the whole screen fills up with £ signs and i am unable to continue to me this looks like the HD is broken, but thats only a guess, ill try the memtest thing now Thanks

Did you remove the connections to the optical drives and see if there was a conflict that was causing you to not start? IN THE MATTERS OF STYLE, swim with the current; in matters of principle, STAND LIKE A ROCK Visit Computer Vitals For A Pleasant Surprise

nope tried everything here and i can think off im not sure if its a hard drive fail or a whole pc fail, but thanks for the help. Jon