I recently went to reboot my computer, but on the XP boot screen with the blue bar, it sat working for a while, maybe over a minute, then froze with two blue boxes at the right. It does this every time, with the hard drive light blinking on and off somewhat regularly before the freeze (it does not stay solid). The "Last known good configuration" did the same thing.

I had installed a USB headset before restarting, so I thought it might be angry at some sound conflicts, so I disabled onboard sound and USB, but it still froze.

I am however able to boot in safe mode, so I uninstalled the sound drivers and tried to do a system recovery to a couple days before. Same thing happened.

I looked in my case, made sure all the fans were running and everything was securely in place.

The event log doesn't say anything, either.

I scanned the boot disk; it didn't find any errors.

Specs:
XP SP2
Abit KN8 Motherboard (onboard AC97 sound)
NVidia 7800 GT

Can anyone help me out here? Or am I doomed to reformat yet again?

i would try a repair install: http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

Thanks, I'll try that when I get home. That slipstreamed SP2 CD should be handy when I need to reformat next as well.

Now it just stops installing. When it says 34 minutes left, and it's 2/3 of the way through Installing Devices it just sits there. The green boxes on the lower right are going but hard drive and CD activity stops. I wait for 10 minutes and nothing changes so I restart... and it gets to that same point and stops again. This is using a slipstreamed SP2 disk.

This error usually indicates a hardware issue. You should remove all hardware but the video and CD drive, plus any USB, Firewire or other divices.

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;828267



http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...es&btnG=Search

I ended up plugging in another hard drive, formatting it, then using the old boot drive as storage. Fortunately I did not lose any data.

Thanks for the update!

Let us know if we can help further in the future.

If you want this thread reopened just PM me.