about a month ago i downloaded service pack two....
the result was my pc was stuck in endless cycle where it rebooted itself every time it got to the xp load up screen thingy, not having the original xp disk (pre installed copy), and living a million mile from the people i bought it from, i decided to try and have it fixed by some one else, turns out the hard drive had somehow broken during the episode. nice. so i bought a new hard drive and a copy of xp home and had that installed, unfortunately it came with sp2 included, cue repeated resetting again. i have disabled the auto reboot on system failure, and updated the graphics driver (which was apparently the cause of one particular reboot), how ever it still insists on having these fits of ineptitude and so the saga continues. any chance anyone has had this experiance and can help? since i can't help but think strategically shaving an ape would render a better form of computer support than windows crash analysis.

cheers mugglewump

hmmm, doesnt sound good! if you know BIOS, i would personally go into the bios and look at the boot up menu and order they are in. make sure that the cd drive is not first in the list and your hard drive is. i doubt its hardware compatibility issues tho if it all worked b4 sp2. maybe get a copy of sp1 and turn off the autoupdates.

sorry cant be any more help.

Sorry to hear about your dilemma mugglewump, I too waited quite awhile before trying out SP2 but after 2 weeks of hell (very slow system), I uninstalled it and reverted to SP1.

Since then, my system had an unrelated crash (fiddling with deleting TIF folders... here's the answer to that: http://www.danish-shareware.dk/soft/emptemp/index.html try it, you'll love it!...freeware, not shareware) where my only recourse was a recovery (I couldn't even get to the prompt!) which of course set everything back to factory specs.

That was about 3 weeks ago. Since then, I have bought an external HD and Norton Ghost so I can make full, rebootable, nightly system image backups. I highly recommend this for everybody because no matter how many restore points or NTBackups you have, if you crash and can't even get to the prompt, these will not help at all. No matter, you can't use them with a prompt anyway! Also, I have attempted to make my own boot disk but you need a copy of the image file which resides on the XP install CD; of course, like most people, my system came preloaded. Luckily, when I bought Ghost, Symantec includes a recovery disk with plenty of boot.ini options.

As a side note: can someone tell me if the XP D:\ partition (used for system recoveries but anything else?) & C:\I386 folder are needed since I have a full backup image at my disposal now. I would love to free up the HD disk space these are taking up right now. TIA.

Back to the reason I decided to post to this thread: in an effort to shove SP2 down everyone's throat, Bill & Co. have made it next to impossible to find a copy of SP1 to download (unless I was just having a bad day). I finally found a copy (xpsp1a_en_x86) but it is supposed to be for multiple boxes only. Needless to say, I haven't used it yet (thanks to my saved image) but I keep it just in case since it was so hard to find in the first place.

Since your first HD came with SP1 (or earlier) originally, I suggest you do a system recovery via F8 during bootup since this should get you back to factory specs. Be warned though, I took me several tries to get it to get past the 2nd or 3rd screen, KEEP TRYING by rebooting into recovery everytime, it fnally went thru (WOW, that was scarey) and now I love my system more than ever before since it gave me a chance to do a full system cleanup and delete things I never used anyway.

G/L.