Hi,

My neighbor messed up his windows installation somehow. He installed some drivers and afterwords the PC (Windows XP Home) would BSOD (0x0000007B). This probably had to do with some IDE drivers or something, but I cloned the partition to an external drive with Knoppix as a backup and proceeded to reinstall Windows. However, they no longer have their restore CD, so I just popped in a retail Home Edition CD and started installing that (the code is on the machine's case). After it restarts, though, the pc would just reboot loop. It will show the dell POST screen progress bar, after which it should start booting into Windows, but then restarts. I tried to disable automatic rebooting but nothing changed, however I did get into the F8 menu so Windows does seem to start up a little bit.

Thinking it's probably a hardware problem I then tried a version with SP3 slipstreamed, but the same thing happened. They wanted it fixed yesterday, so I don't think they have the patience to wait for a new Dell CD if that's even possible. Is there any other trick I can try?

Hello.

Have you tried booting into safe mode? It won't fix the problem, but if you can we can get some info from there.

Hi I think you need to install additional drivers via the F6 key during install like Limited OEM driver support is available with F6 during Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 setup what brand and model is the PC?

Retail CD using an OEM Key is not likely to work.
Any OEM CD will work with any OEM Key. My CyberPower disk worked on a Dell once. The computer thought it was not a dell anymore though.

That's a good point. That said, if it installed then it has likely worked anyway, so that is probably not the problem.

I bet its a driver issue like this he will need to install driver via the F6 key Limited OEM driver support is available with F6 during Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 setup he did metion a Stop 0x0000007B

During the text-mode phase of the setup process, Windows pauses briefly and prompts you to press F6. This option is displayed in the status line and lets you use an OEM mass storage controller driver. The F6 option is provided strictly as a means to install OEM drivers for mass storage controllers only. This is required to let the installation of the operating system continue. Microsoft does not support using F6 to install any device driver other than mass storage controller drivers.

Note Mass storage controller drivers can be loaded only from floppy disks by using the F6 key. The F6 key cannot be used to load drivers that are stored on USB flash drives, on USB hard disks, or on other external storage devices.

so you guys don't think it could be this??

You for sure formatted the hard drive, so all existing data is gone? If you just installed overtop of the old installation, then errors can creep across to the new installation.

Running SP3, Try installing it again without a key. That's a new feature in SP3. Just bypass the message asking for the key, you can type it in later.