Please Help - A7N8X DLX - PC Won't Boot All Of The Sudden

[D. Bell]

I left my PC on last night, woke up this morning to a black screen.
Normally that's fine because I have my PC set to turn off the monitor after
3 hours of inactivity. I move the mouse and nothing. Then I notice the
mouse LED is not even on. I also notice the keyboard lights are not on.
So, I figure it froze during the night and hit the "reset" button on my
case. Windows comes up to that screen where you can choose Safe Mode, Last
Know Good Configuration or Start Normally. I try "Start Normally" and the
screen goes black and it reboots. I then try "Last Know Good Config" and
the same thing happens. I try Safe Mode and it starts to load a few files
and then freezes.
So THEN I try booting off my XP CD and it comes up telling me I am missing
files i386\NTLDRla something something.
I then try to boot normally and get "Software Error: Load Needed DLLs for
Hal." So at this point I have no clue. I can't even boot from my XP CD to
do an inplace upgrade cause I keep getting errors. Does this sound like a
software or hardware problem? Not sure what to do at this point. Any help
would be appreciated. Thanks.

-db

 

[D. Bell]

Any ideas guys?

-db

 

[AJ]

Any ideas guys?

-db

Had that on my XP notebook 2 weeks ago. The HDD was bad. If I choose
no-LAN I could get it to start in safe mode but got about 5 error
messages of missing files. It would lockup half way through checkdisk.
You can download XP on 6 floppies. I only say that since you should
be able to run Checkdisk which I believe should be your next goal.
XP PRO on 6 floppies:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...FamilyID=55820EDB-5039-4955-BCB7-4FED408EA73F

 

[D. Bell]

Thanks for your help - I'll give that a try tonight.

 

[D. Bell]

Well, before I did anything software related, I replaced both RAM sticks and
it booted up just fine Looks like I had some crappy RAM. w00t!!

-db