Sorry it took so long to reply, Alex. I was tearing apart the house for my Windows XP CD (which I still haven't found:rolleyes: ). I'm pretty much up the creek without a paddle if I don't find it.

This is turning into a wonderful evening.

Thanks for your help though, Alex. I really appreciate it!

Well, on most systems one beep means all is well with the stuff BIOS checks.

Short of troubleshooting with known-good software and hardware that you don't have I haven't many suggestions. If you do have another video card I'd throw that in and see if it makes a difference.

It shouldn't make any difference but have you tried manually booting into Safe Mode rather than relying on the automated reboot? Press F8 right before Windows starts.

My first thing to do would be to use a canned air duster and clean out the inside of the computer - dust bunnies love to multiply in the heatsinks and fans of processors - cpus and gpus. If anything hardware fried here, I'd be more apt to believe it's the gpu - especially given that you said you were playing Sims 2 for a while (a pretty gpu intense app).

Even a very clean looking system can be hiding damaging dust in the heatsink fins, which prevents the heatsink from efficiently moving heat away from the cpu/gpu.

Based on your description, It does not sound like a heat problem.

With a stuck fan or dusted up cooler you would still be able to boot but the PC would hang/crash after some random amount of time. A problem serious enough to kick in during boot (ie no heat-sink at all on the CPU) would quickly fry that component resulting in a very solid error.

It sounds like you have (excuse the technical term) fuddied up one of the core Windows drivers. When/if you find the XP install cd you should be able to run a repair. I don't suppose you have an Rdisk handy by any chance? Nope. I thought not. No one ever does.

Note: This does NOT imply you should not follow Matts advice. It's possible you fuddied your PC with a heat related issue as he described although I would guess it was the software you installed.

Also be sure to re-run the windows update program after you run the repair (assuming it works).

Thanks CoasterMatt and Moonliner!

I will do both of these just as soon as I find the disk. It just has to be here somewhere.

Just out of curiousity, what are your thoughts as to whether this could be a virus?

Ok, I found the disk. It loaded up the files, then gave me the option of clean install or repair. I chose repair. It proceeded to load the recovery console, then gave me a DOS prompt. And there it sits...

Any thoughts?

Edited to add, I was able to run chkdsk. It found one or more errors on the drive. Thoughts?

I'm obviously trying desperately to avoid reformatting at all costs.

How do you feel about a clean install?

From the dos prompt can you see the data on your drive(s)? If so you can copy off any files you need such as "My documents" and the like before the rebuild.

If you can't see your files from the dos prompt, then you can skip that first step :D

Make sure you have copies off all the software you need, especially the base drivers (network, display, etc...)

Good luck. Oh and during the rebuild be sure you DO NOT use the quick format option just in case your hard drive has a bad sector that is causing this issue.

As for your earlier question, could this be a virus? Yes, but I doubt it.

Can't check to see if I can see the files just yet. I am running chkdsk /r and seeing if it can repair the problems it found. It is taking quite a while but slowly making progress.

Suppose, for laughs, that I can see the contents of the C drive. I don't suppose it is possible to burn a dvd from the command line prompt, is it? Or, as a last resort*, how would I go about transferring files to the USB port via command line.

* I would hate to have to go this route, as I only have a 512MB USB drive and about 10 gigs of files to backup, but I suppose it isn't insurmountable, if it is possible.

Or you could spend $100 or so - go buy a new hard drive - put it in - load windows - install your old hard drive as a slave and pull the files off that way.

Good god you already have him ready to reformat... there will probably be all kinds of HD file errors from all the thrashing around. Rebooting in safemode and shutting down from it two or three times even is the safest first course then try last known good config... then go out and get or download a HD repair utillity and boot off it from CD and let it do a sector by sector repair checkout your HD's S.M.A.R.T. reporting or just a filesystem rebuild and repair and after all that barring any other hardware failures you should consider going more medeval on it's ass and do a clean install.

Make any sense?

Oh and coaster matt made very good point infact I am going to do a canned air blast on all my machines too I did have the windows open most of this weekend.

disneyfan makes another good point a linux boot CD would be a great way to isolate the problem to hardware or Windoze and get more detailed errors as it loads or fails to load

Another problem that might cause this kind of chaos depending on your motherboard is the 3V BIOS & Clock backup battery crapping out worth checking if you have one and after replacing various componants still have intermitant problems if your machine is over 2 years old you should replace anyhow