Hi, this is probably not going to help very much, but I wanted to let you
know that you're not on your own here.
I had a very similar problem recently, which turned out to be a problem with
the harddrive.
I'm not sure what the problem was, but if I tried a different  drive, it was
fine. Problem was, I wanted to use that particular drive, which,
incidentally was second hand. (fujitsu)
I tried repartitioning, writing zero's, fdisk /mbr , you name it, every
thing I could think of, I tried. There were no bad sectors on the drive at
all, yet when I load xp it would  not restart properly. I even tried a low
level format as a last resort.
In the end, Igave up and loaded win2000pro  which was the nearest I could
get to xp without it actually being xp.
I needed to get the system up and running so could not spend any more time
on it.
I don't know why this kept happening, but it's fine with 2000 for some
reason. Out of curiosity, I tried a number of different o/s's on the same
hard drive and no problems with any of them. 2000pro  is ntfs, so it's not a
fat32/ntfs problem, which is what I first suspected.
The system runs fine now.
In my case, it definately was a hard drive problem as any other drive I
installed was fine.
Maybe someone can enlighten me also on this one? It aslo had 256mb Ram
installed.
Sorry I couldn't be of more help, and I no longer have the system here, but
I would be grateful for an answer in case I'm ever stuck again.

Michele Sayer


---
Just to clarify; if you've got a virus, it's not from me!
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
Version: 6.0.716 / Virus Database: 472 - Release Date: 05/07/2004

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