The strangest thing

Sparkicks

Installed "DriverMax" the other day (may or may not be the problem)
checked for updates installed a few and then installed the end ones that looked like more integrated drivers for motherboard or bios or whatever

Whatever happened my computer is now in a state when if i turn it on it loads bios then hits the "windows" section i just get a black screen (monitor not on standby) a one hit to the power turns it off as if it was a blue screen.safe mode loads about 3/4 way down and then freezes and all other modes do do pretty similar.
Ive sucessfully loaded a few live cds that i had lying around but a few actually froze.
Tried windows reinstall to hope to repair but that actually blue screaned from pci.sys
ive taken out all pci cards all usbs (except keyboard) and disabled the hdd from bios but problems still persist. I had a boot cd with a few diag tools but it froze on boot aswell so so far it seems im a bit tied down.
What does it sound like to you guys? Next on my list is to check out the memory but i dont have a terrible lot of resources for checking hardware parts .

Biggins

If your doing a full install again, have you reformatted the drive as part of the proceedure?
In the likelyhood that there is a hidden boot sector virus or rootkit, etc, this might help to relieve the problem (if it is responsible at all).

guil

i had the exact same problem usin driver max, i downloaded newer versions of the drivers and it was installin them but i got a blue screen sayin somethin bout pci.sys so i used the xp cd to repair it, hope it works for u

Sparkicks

im not trying to reinstall it im just using the cd to repair it but i cant seem to get the cd to load its (reinstalling windows xp home) cd but when i attempt to boot it and it begins to load before you get to any options screens it blue screens the pc with the pci.sys
as for the hidden boot sector ive checked actually there isnt but formatting is out of the question i have too much data to backup (about 300 gigs of it)

guil07: which cd did you use and did you happen to get the same error when trying to boot from the cd as i did?

Biggins

IF you know what you are doing
and IF you feel the file pci.sys is responsible, you might try the following...

...get your system up and running into basic DOS level, rename the file pci.sys to pci.bak and have a copy of pci.sys (from another machine) and transfer that over to your machine into the root dir.
Reboot and see if that helps.
If it don't, the possibility of having to reformat is coming closer ..but not yet.

If it still don't work, you should try to get your hands on a reparticioning tool, see can you make at DOS level a second particion and transfer your 300 gig data over to that.
That will allow you then to go back to your c: drive, format it and try installing a fresh version of Windows.

DON'T do the above unless you know what you are doing.

Sparkicks

i reckon since i disabled the hard drive and it still crashed on the windows boot cd thats its nothing to do with whats on the hard drive. (unless you recommend replacing the pci.sys on the windows install cd )
im not too informed on how hardware can hold drivers or some sort of software but if ive managed to upload it straight to the "whatever" can i remove it or reset it back

(this is totally excluding the hdd now since it was disabled and i still had problems with windows install cd and a live cd or 2)