Hello all, this is my first post so I wasnt exactly sure where to post the topic as I am not sure wheather I have a hardware problem or windows problem.

Anyway, I have a 2 year old Alienware Aurora with the following specs:
AMD Athlon 64 3800+
ASUS A8V Delux motherboard
Western Digital 36gb Rapter Hard drive (primary drive - windows)
WD 160gb HD (secondary)
ATI Radeon X800 pro graphics card

The problem that I am having is that my computer restarts after showing the black windows loading screen. It restarts indefinately. Furthermore, it will not start in safe mode. I decided to use my "respawn" cd to reinstall windows on my promary hard drive. The reformat seems to work fine, but I still have the same problems. When I tried to load windows in safe mode after reformating, it brought up an error message that said "windows is not fully installed." Im no expert, but Im thinking that my hard drive has some bad spots on it which is screwing up the windows load. Would a new hard drive fix this problem? any advice would be greatly apppreciated.

Thanks,
BOOSTD

I am unfamiliar with this 'spawn cd' you used in order to format, the way I format is I take my original operating system CD, the cd you used to install windows with, and I follow the simple prompts and then do a full format. With the sounds of your system, I would try and use that secondary hard drive if a full format does not work. I did assume at first that there could be some bad portions of your hard drive. Be sure to do a full format, and use NTFS. If using both the first hard drive, and the second hard drive, then it would be fairly safe to assume that this is a hardware issue. It might be deeper then simply a hard drive and it may go as deep as the controller or something else on the motherboard. Good luck!

Welcome tot he PC Help Forum Boostd.
From the sounds of it, there may be more CD's required for your reinstall of Windows.

If you did a 'repair' install of windows, this will unlikely fix the issue you're having.

And to me, it actually sounds like the power supply might be suffering a bit.

@Brad
Alienware is much like Dell, HP, IBM, Gateway, etc etc how they have preloaded images and have 'restore' cds which automatically load the image and drivers from the time of deployment...hence the 'respawn' name given to such CD. And as they have a special agreement with Microsoft, they get Windows cheaper, making it cheaper for clients, but do not have to give them Windows CDs and the CD keys you get only work with their versions of Windows....it's a pain for techs, but it's good for people who don't care about building their own PC.

Im pretty sure that I didnt "repair" windows but instead restored it to its original factory setup using the CD. There are no other options in the "respawn" program.

Using the second hard drive isnt an option because I have lots of important files saved on it. From what I understand, this cd will completely erase everything and install windows on it.

I am really lost on what to do next. Should I buy the real windows xp, a new hard drive, a new power supply, etc... Advice or help would be greatly appreciated because I am at a dead end with the knowledge that I have and right now my computer is nothing more than a big paperweight.

thanks,
BOOSTD

If you want to check your hard drives, here is a neat little utility provided by Seagate at no charge. It will check your motherboard, ide controller,memory, and hard drives. I use it to check used drives and memory, and it is very accurate. 99% of the time, if it tells you the drive is ok, you have other problems. You can download it for floppy, cd, or do an online scan:
SeaTools - Seagate Technology

Does that SeaTools work for non seagate hard drives though?

Boostd, have you tried installing it a second time? It might have had some issues.

It works on every brand ive tried it on so far GaRHaR, Maxtor , fujitsu, western digital, quantum. It says in the doc`s, that it may not work on all drives, but so far it has. Wont cost much to try it, and itll check memory, and controller, all in one program.