microsoft updates

My computer downloaded some updates from Microsoft on July 14th and after I clicked on the restart for it to take affect.... Nothing! My computer no longer boots up. Windows logo comes up with the blue bar showing that it is loading but then a blue screen flashes a message so fast that you can't read any of it. I put my Windows XP disc in the cd drive to reinstall windows over my existing install but the disc is not recognized when I reboot to it. I do have it as my first boot device in bios. Then I tried loading my win98 drivers to get to the A: prompt. Typing A:\dir shows me contents of the floppy, Then to C:\dir and it shows that windows boot disc installed the ram drive to my C:, changing it to D:\dir and then E:\dir shows no contents for these drives. Why isn't my windows install not showing up anywhere? Is there a known problem with the recent updates from microsoft that possibly installed a bad driver? Why would it prevent my windows xp disc from being recognized? I tried two different cd drives and still nothing. Anybody have any advice?

Windows 98 boot floppy will not work for NTFS volumes... only FAT or FAT32. Do you have an nVidia card? I know that MS considers a certain nVidia driver to be a critical update... and if you allow it to download and install, it will cause blue screens... especially on older nVidia cards. Try to see if you can boot into safe mode... if you can, then chances are it's a driver issue.

Safe mode and last good configuration do not work. I removed my video card and used the onboard video and still nothing. I set bios to factory default. The diagnostic software for western digital doesn't help me much, I'm trying not to resort to reformatting the drive. Thanks for the help everyone. I'll keep at it.

Have you set Boot order to -- Floppy - CDROM - HD0? Do you get message 'Press any key to boot from CD'? If you can boot from XP CD you can do a Repair Install, only take SECOND repair option, first is Recovery Console.

Mike.