Well, you mentioned something about spare hardware, so maybe you'd be okay with opening the computer and reseating the cables and memory.

Because if you're telling us it's hanging in BIOS, you're saying it's broken.

 

It doesn't actually get to bios, as soon as it either; gets past hardware screen (i'm not sure of the 'name' of this screen, my bad), or I press anything, it just hangs permanently. I even left it for about 5 hours earlier after pressing f8 and it did nothing. :\

edit: Hey waddya know, I can get into BIOS now. I'm not sure what's different but i'm not complaining. I still don't know how i can fix anything from bios though. Trying to boot from CD or from safe mode still results in a dead black screen.

 

Click on the Memtest link in my signature . . Test the memory for errors

 

How could I do this without being able to log on? Apologies if I sound retarded, i'm not tech savvy at all I just happened to know a few acronyms ;p

Though I ran memtest just last week (added another stick prior to testing) and it showed 0 errors.

 

Remove the new stick and try booting again. Maybe it is not seated properly. Remove it anyways and try.

 

Problem persists. However! after putting it back in I managed to boot from cd and partition my drive, maybe you were right about it's seating or something I dunno..

Anyway, now my problem is I have a completely blank drive, and my home XP disc seems to be broke or something since I can't complete setup (gets to 79% then I get 100's of dll's/cabs/etc unable to be copied). Any suggestions? Disc looks in mint condition from my eyes, i'm not sure why it's failing.

Appreciate the help by the way, thanks.

 

I would just keep that one stick out until you have successfully installed Windows. Memory problems usually manifest themselves at the same point during a Windows installation.

 

Tried installing with or without the new stick (tried without just after my last post), and it got to 32% before the buttload of xxx.xxx files are unable to be copied.

% installation seems to be random by the way, i'm not insinuating the installation was worse with or without the extra stick.

 

Well, in retrospect, I've also encountered random problems when the memory is having a problem. Are you able to burn CDs? I'd like you to try a burning a boot CD with some diagnostic utilities.

 

The computer i'm on has a cd writer yeah, but i'm really clueless to what you mean about a boot cd with diagnostic utilities?

 

Here's to hoping that you know how to burn a CD from an ISO. There are two popular boot CDs that you can download, burn, and then boot from to run all sorts of diagnostic utilities to get to the bottom of this problem. They are:

Hiren's Boot CD
http://www.kaldata.net/modules.php?modid=1&action=show&id=579
(Download link leads to a .rar file. You'll have to extract the ISO using Winrar or Alzip)

Ultimate Boot CD
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/
(Download link on left.)

 

Sigh, this computer didn't even have any writing software OR drivers installed. Fixed that and burnt Hiren's Boot CD with magicISO, what am I supposed to be doing with it now? I've never used one of these before so I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing. :\

Once again, thanks for your efforts. mucho appreciated!

 

Thank you also for your efforts!

Here is a link that shows the programs that are on it:
http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd

Okay, we're still focusing on the RAM as a possible cause. The boot CD has 3 different utilities to check the RAM. I guess you'd want to use the highest version one, GoldMemory 5.07. There are also some utilities that will fully check the system.

 

Seems my hard drive is.. blank now so i'm not sure what i'm actually searching for or how it'll get me back a working OS? but i'll play around with it anyway

Will report back in a few hours

thanks

 

the ram test program came back as.. (after 4 hours of scanning, about 5-6 full scans..)

8 bad bits: (N/A) - 16 bad bits: (N/A) - 32 bad bits xxxx---------------------------x

No idea what that means but oh well.