Windows doesnt load

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Originally posted here by philman213
So I guess Im left to reinstalling windows...I tried, and I get an error after the installation has loaded. It says there is something wrong with the hardware or software, something new installed.

So I decided to in stall FreeBSD 4.9 on this computer instead, and put windows XP on my other computer with the untouched hard drive. What do you guys think? Is this a good plan? The Windows XP computer will be used for programming, making graphics, and playing counter-strike :). The FreeBSD computer will be used as a server.

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A couple of observations here.

There are two ways to reinstall Windows (any flavour).

(1) Reinstall it over the top of your existing configuration.
This can sometimes work, if for example you have somehow mangled a key Windows file, but on a screwed up system this won't work.

(2) Reformat and reinstall.
Ideally you should first run a low level format, as lepricaun suggested.
When you reinstall Windows, make sure you choose the option that does a full format of your hard drive i.e. not the quick format option.
This will give you confidence that you don't have a hard drive error, which is always possible.
I've seen stranger symptoms which were caused by hard drive errors ...

Can't see that switching the 2 PCs over makes any difference, as you should do a low level format of your damaged Windows PC anyway.

It hasn't been mentioned so..
Bad memory (or cheap memory) is another frequent cause of problems like this.
Try reseating or swapping sticks around.. or getting new memory instead.
You could try running Docmemory V 2.0 or Memtest86 but even if you have failures, you still won't be sure unless you swap it out. Some OS's are more forgiving of bad or incompatable memory.

And generally it bugs me when people start throwing around the term/phrase "low level format" when they really should say "zero fill". This post here is a good explanation of what low level formatting is/was about.

It's too late now, I'm sure. If someone else reads this post, try the system rollback feature first. I've had a little(twice) success with that feature in the past.

I would rank this feature as Microsoft's best work in the last several years. Although it uses a lot of ones hard drive.