Windows XP won't boot

[sahendri]

My friends gave me an emachine T2682. When I turn it on it boots normally but right before windows begins to load I get a blue error screen that only lasts like 5 ms, then it goes into a reboot cycle. I tried a different hard drive that came from a different emachine and it works normally but it was for a different model so I loaded the right recovery cd's on it. That made it do the exact same thing as before. Does anybody know what may be causing this?
Thanks.

 

[oscaryu1]

1. Crashed HDD
2. Dying memory

1. Do an full reformat.

2. Take out one stick at an time, see if the problem occurs

 

[sahendri]

I've tried 3 different HDD and several different sticks of memory

 

[sahendri]

One thing I'm not sure about is when it boots it shows the bios version and it all looks good and detects the IDE hard drive, but then it goes to another screen that shows a RAID Bios version number and says SATA drive not detected. I'm not sure if that's important really.

 

[brian]

Welcome to computer forum btw.
o it has raid. see if you can gointo the raid config and see if any hd are in there

 

[sahendri]

When I enter the raid setup and hit R it says "Not enough disk can be created RAID". I noticed on the MB the RAID1 and 2 jumpers look like they're not active (orange plastic things on them).

 

[sahendri]

Oh wait, that's the SATA1 and 2 things. I'm not sure why the RAID setup doesn't detect the HDD.

 

[brian]

hum. it could be your motherboard then

 

[sahendri]

What's confusing is that it worked with a different HDD with a preloaded emachine 1840 recovery on it.

 

[oscaryu1]

... are you trying to use an HDD with another OS already installed it? You cannot play + play hard drives you notice..

 

[sahendri]

no, i just insert the emachine cd's and it reformats the HDD and installs the OS and drivers. I can't even get it to boot to safe mode.

 

[oscaryu1]

If you have the origional HD why not just use it?

Using different HDDs will not cause an BSOD... (usually)... I find it very weird that you cannot give it another HDD... Try putting it as CAble select and then reformat..

 

[sahendri]

some guy on emachine chat support said that you couldn't use a different hard drive with the restore cds. I checked the original hdd for errors and found some and so I zero'd it out. Then reloaded the restore cd's but same problem. I'm gonna borrow a winXP cd and see if I can get into the recovery console and see what happens from there.