Weird xp boot loop.

[glowinghamster45]

Hey all, running into a weird problem here. Was fixing my dads computer up for him, it wasn't booting properly so seemed like a fresh xp install was all he needed. So I try to reinstall the OS, but I constantly got errors during setup that one file or another couldn't be copied, I could skip them but then the system would blue screen before the setup would finish. Was assuming bad hard drive, but decided to try one last thing before spending money on one, so I plugged the hd into my rig just to get the OS on there, and it completed setup perfectly fine. Messed around on xp for a bit to make sure everything was all good before taking it out and plugging it into the other rig. Now when I boot, it will start up, go as far as the welcome screen, then flash the blue screen for a fraction of a second then restart. I'm at a loss here, I knew there would be a little weirdness turning it on the first time because of the new hardware, but it should still be starting up I would think. Any input would be greatly appreciated.

 

[glowinghamster45]

Another thing worth mentioning is that it will not allow me to boot into safe mode in its current state. All I can access is the bios.

 

[Saga Lout]

Hello and welcome to Tom's Hardware Forums.

If it won't boot into Safe Mode, does it go as far as showing that menu if you keep tapping Function 8? If it does, try "Disable automatic restart on system failure" so you get a chance to see the blue screen. It sounds as though it falls over at the stage when basevideo hands over to the graphics card and all the settings for that belong to your other system.

 

[glowinghamster45]

Well some progress made, previously I wasn't even able to get the F8 menu up because of this error on startup stating that there is a floppy disk failure. Weird thing is this computer doesn't even have a floppy drive. Has a slot for it, but was never graced with one back in the day. Well if I boot into safe mode it does about the same thing except it shows the user accounts for a few seconds before crashing. Tried to disable automatic restart, flashed an error about some ntfs file being corrupted and refused to do it.

Ok just tried to disable it again and for some reason this time it worked, but its just hanging up on the welcome screen, not going any further. About ready to just tell my dad he needs a new system.

 

[ktownmike]

f2 maybe to check boot order in bios or f12 to change boot order on the fly, since it wants to boot to a nonexistant floppy that may be part of the problem. Since you seem to not care about existing programs reinstall windows from the cd using f12 probably to boot from cd.