Campquake Senate

Sounds to me like you have a bad XP disc. Or it's just too scratched to copy over the vga.sys file without corrupting it.
I'd suggest trying another XP disc if you can get your hands on one.

That actually worked KD. The sucky thing is the only other XP disc I have is a cracked version and it has some lame keygen... so hopefully I can find a good SN to at least install XP...

I did actually get to the recovery section on the disc, but no dice. I formatted the drive and am re-installing

Blech...

M4v3r1ck wrote:So i ran the windows memory diagnostic tool that you recommended Neo and with both sticks in, all tests failed. So I took out, what I believe to be, the faulty stick and ran the tests again. All tests succeeded this time. So obviously it is a faulty piece of ram. Now I just have to sit back and wait for an RMA from OCZ.

So Cowl, perhaps you should do some tests on your memory to see if that is the same problem that you are having????

Cheers

Mav

That's excellent Mav! I recommended using WMD because, for me, it's been 100% correct at identifying BAD RAM. It's never identified bad RAM as good and never identified good RAM as bad. So I'm confident that we've found your problem. Post back and let us know how the return process goes with OCZ.

Cowl[CotC] wrote:...But I guess my question would be why does safe mode boot up fine everytime I go into it if a RAM stick is bad? Wouldn't that also affect a boot into safe mode?

Cheers and thanks to Neo for all the excellent help!
Cowl

Hey Cow, Ever wonder why Safe Mode takes such a long to bootup? Sometimes it takes minutes to boot into safe mode, but booting into Windows normally would just take a few seconds. (Usually less than 45 seconds.) That's because Safe Mode is testing the memory before it writes to it. It ignores your normal startup files and uses Himem.sys with the /testmem option. Regular Windows bootup process don't test the memory first.

Safe Mode also does not load any device drivers. (The drivers made by the manufacture or custom drivers made to control devices.) Usually these devices get loaded from System.ini, instead, it uses a standard VGA driver and loads virtual devices from System.cb.

Any way, it sounds like you're formatting and are on the road to recovery. You might want to run a Scandisk on the hard drive, or when you format use the full format method (instead of Quick format if it's available to you.). That way, if your problem was caused by disk corruption then Windows will catch that bad part of the disk and write your files around it so that this doesn't happen again.

Thanks for the info Neo... despite me hating computers at times (usually only when they aren't working properly) I really dig learning about them. Thanks fo the info about Safe Mode and the inner workings of some of these issues... much appreciated!!!

Anyway, I did the long format and no errors were detected so all in all I have absolutely no idea what happened or why. I got XP up and SP2 installed and the newest nVidia vid drivers loaded and all seems well at this prelim stage. I didn't connect the PC to the internet and do all the updates, etc yet so hopefully if that goes well, then it will be GTG. Just odd why it would do that...

Anyways thanks to everyone for reading and lending a helping hand... it sounds like from all of your help two brothers got up and running again!

Thanks and have a great Holiday!
Cowl

Wowsers!!! That was a story from Hell.

So I sent OCZ my memory. And wouldnt you know it. Even though I had one good stick running and one faulty stick, because I bought them as a package, they wanted both sent back. So I sent them my RAM on December 28 and FINALLY just received it the other day. Two brand new sticks but with some serious downtime. Anyways... hoping for no more faulty hardware.