Well I gave BARTPE boot CD a try, it loaded fine, seemed to get to the end of the progress bar, then a black screen, no HD activity.

I think something is wrong with another PC component that is preventing any sort of thing running successfully besides a floppy boot disk.

Well I gave BART PE a try...seemed to work fine, got to the progress bar, once it finished loading...black screen. No HDD activity. Retried again, removed everything except for keyboard, video card, and power cable. same result

Same as with loading XP (safe mode shows the drivers as they are loading, but then pauses on a certain SYS or DLL file).

Is there something wrong besides a HD or memory that could be causing the problem? Maybe a video card?

I appear to have been granted a minor miracle...clearing the BIOS via jumper and power off somehow let me get into Windows.

Now all I need to verify is if the HD's are in fact bad at all.

Doing sfc /scannow at the moment,

is there a preferable way to do scandisk that won't hog up the PC for hours or days? any other HD / OS verifications I should try?

Hey Keevan in command prompt copy and paste chkdsk /r and hit enter on your keyboard.

If you get chkdsk cannot run now etc.Type in Y and hit enter on your keyboard or type exit.Resart the computer chkdsk will scan your hard drive to either fix any bad sectors or attmept to fix.It may appear to hang at some stages please do not worry let it run.

Let me know the results please.

JB.

No problems with the HD...somehow it turned out to be the BIOS.

Chkdsk found a few file fragments, nothing big

sorry my post was for the last page