[cnelson8611]

I did some work on a friends PC this last weekend and I wanted to share exactly what it was doing and ask what it could have been. I've already fixed the problem by reinstalling Win XP but I believe I could have been able to keep the original settings if I knew what the exact problem was.
Ok... The PC wouldn't boot up, it would freeze before it got the welcome screen. So I tryed to go into Safe Mode to run some diagnostics but after booting, the PC would go back to the screen in which it was freezing on.
So I tryed Recovery Console from the Win XP boot disk and ran ScanDisk thinking there was a corrupt boot sector (or something of that sort). Scan disk would get through the 2nd step but at 78% of the scan it would restart at 50%.
I got tired of it and just reinstalled XP and upgraded to SP2 since my friend cannot avoid spyware!
But if I ever encounter this problem again is there other diagnostic processes I could go through before reinstalling.... and for those who have seen this problem... what could it have been???

[killians45]

you could try fixboot and fixmbr

[Jorsoft]

maybe you can boot from DOS and run scandisk from there. You'll definently have to reinstall XP again after that. Be sure to fix the boot sector, however, as this is your problem.