messed up computer

ok, you guys have helped a lot of people with a lot of problems, including some of mine. Hopefully some one will have a suggestion for this one:

I have a supermicro p4 sda+ 1.9ghz runnin winxp with 1/2 gig ddr dual boot with redhat linux.
2 western digital 60 gig & 1 western 120 gig HD's

Winxp on boot stalls on the splash screen with the highlight bar half way through. Since that was noticed, and nothing easy could fix, decided to fdisk/format, reinstall. Wiped all disks, reinstalled. Winxp hung at same place. Redhat still booted fine with no errors (no problem with linux from the beginning). Fdisk format again, reset c-mos, reinstall. Still hung halfway through winxp splash screen. Searched the i-net and dled Kill Disk. This supposedly overwrote the entire HD(s) with a boot disk and wrote data on all possable blocks. After compleat, fdisk, format, reinstall. Still xp hung on splash screen, and redhat booted fine. Finally, i took out all possable hardware cept whats needed to boot. winxp still hung.... I am currently seeking a hardware tester of some sort or any suggestions any of you might have. I just can't figure this one out, been fighting with it for a week. And yes, microsoft sux, but it was working fine for months. I have removed, covered, deleted, and overwritten everything, whats next? But, the computer will boot in safe mode and not on diagnostic startup....

any suggestions please!!!!!

if its hanging on splash screen it looks to be an issue during a driver or hardware initialization. Not too familiar with XP myself but I would check your drivers. Also check hardware settings in cmos... (bios). if your really into troubleshooting you can disable all devices (onboard audio, serial ports, etc) and see if that clears the issue... if it does.. well you get to enable one by one untill you find which one is causing the problem.

best of luck to ya... eventually someone with XP experience has gotta have a better answer he he

Thanks for the reply jrc. I have tried disabling everything as far as hardware goes. Although i did come to the same conclusion, if its on the splash screen it should be driver/hardware related.....

hmmm, have you stripped memory down and tried that. I've found Linux to be much more forgiving of bad ram than XP, NT, or 2k

Also, are you sure it's not a bad sector or something on the hard disk. Try swapping one of the drives if you haven't already. You may be getting the same results because you are loading the two different OSs on the same partitions each time. The portion that you are installing Linux on could be fine, but the XP partition could be screwed up. Sorry, but that's the only other thing I can think of for your situation.

could be that win XP may not like dual booting with redhat?

i know someone who ran into trouble trying to do this on one of his computers, but the thing that stands out to me is stopping halfway through the boot screen. this happened on my xp pro box when i had trouble with nero and decided that an uninstall and removal of all nero stuff from the registry would fix the problem...

talk about XP having a full whinge about it, couldnt do a sys recovery coz it was that bad, ended up doing a reformat from the beginning, maybe the sys recover would help you or you could try safe mode?

Make sure XP is running on your primary partition, and have linux run on your extended. Windows likes to be first, and has fits when it's not, but Linux is unbiased. If that doesn't work, try installing XP without Linux and see if it runs by itself. That at least will help you figure out what the problem is. You may even need to run Linux within windows. As pointless as that seems you may want to consider it as a last ditch effort to have the opportunity of using both.

Thanks for all the suggestions. Unfortunatly, every time i fdisk/formatted, i removed all partitions on all disks, and started with XP first, so it's not the dual OS. I just installed RedHat second to see if it would boot, which it does. The dual boot was set up when winXP was working about 3 weeks ago. With all that I have done, i have basically come to the conclusion that it is either both HD's or the motherboard/processor.... Not much I can do from here without a specialist huh? I really hate takin my comp into the shop though..... Any of you know any good diagnostic/troubleshooting places for custom boxes in Colorado?

Again, thanks for all the suggestions, hopefully I can get this box up some day again....