ok - this just started today when I took out my 2nd hard drive, which contained an installation of Lindows OS, and the boot loader. That drive was installed as 'slave' and my 1st drive (with windows xp on) is the 'master'. When I tried to boot into windows xp (with only the 1st hard drive) the screen showed " L 01 01 01" over and over again.. I got out a DOS floppy, and did 'fdisk /mbr' . Upon rebooting, i got to the windows bootloader, and the "Windows XP Professional" booting screen. Then, about 5 seconds later, the little progress bar across the bottom stopped, and my keyboard lights (num lock, caps lock,etc) (and those on my external USB hub) went out. I tried rebooting in safe mode, and it stalled on mup.sys, tried safe mode w/ command promt & safe mode with networking - they all freeze at mup.sys . So, I popped in my windows xp pro cd, to try to either get to a recovery console, or re-install windows. The windows installer took me through the loading of all the files (dsiplayed across the bottom - like loading all the drivers and stuff). Then it says "Setup is starting windows" - normally after that it takes me to the partitioning, then the option to install windows - but it froze at the "Setup is starting windows" - I let it sit for over an hour, didn't move. so I rebooted, tried running Knoppix (a run-from-CD version of Linux), then Mandrake Linux 9.2 install CD - both hung on 'loading' screens. Finally, I ran a 'windows memory error checker' , it's a bootable CD I downloaded earlier this summer from Microsoft - my system's memory passed all the tests. While I was doing all of this, the hard drive access light (LED on front of case, usually blinks when windows is accessing the hard drive) stayed on constantly. I've ruled out the system's RAM via the windows memory checker I mentioned above. I know it's not the CD drive, because my bootable DOS utility CDs work. Anyone have any idea what's happening ? I'd perfer not to lose data, but if there's no other way it's not a problem. - Tyler Update : I ran scandisk on the drive in question (took it out of the not working computer and installed it as a secondary drive in another box, then ran scandisk on it from windows) and it came back with no errors - yet xp boot still hangs as described above.

all i can say is, your dangerous around computers. get some help

This is a very tricky one as u seem to have tried just about everything. I think u need to establish whether it's the HD or some other hardware that is at fault. One way of doing that (since u have access to another machine) would be to replace the HD in the other machine with ur 'suspect' one and attempt an install from there (but obviously not proceeding to a full install). If u can rule out the 'suspect' HD, then try removing all PCI cards, swapping RAM, cdrom unit etc until u find the culprit. GoodLuck

you have the same problem I had ,stalling after the first reboot. I found out it was my AGP card wasn't supported by XP because it came out after XP did. So i fitted an old 2 meg pci card and finished the setup then replaced it with my AGP card. The problem was XP didnt have the drivers for my AGP and it was stuck trying to set it up !!