I'm cobbling together a machine from parts my son gave me, all new , unused. Only had to buy a case. He's gone for a mo. so can't ask him. Here's the prob: the only part that's not new and unused is the HD. I took it out of one of my other machines. It's a maxtor, maybe 3 mos old with XP pro on it. The machine it was in has a P3 500 chip in it on an old intel (dell) motherboard, (and bios) The new MB is an 800mgz fsb with a P4 2.6 chip. When I turn it on all fans work, the monitor works, it runs thru it's bios thing. It recognizes the HD,CDRW, AGP card, proper memory amount. The screen says "we apologize, windows did not start successfully, a recent hardware or software change may have caused this" What do you guys think?
yeah..new,clean instalation of windows can be good solution. dot forget six magic bullets(that how i call them)-six diskettes for new installation. http://www.microsoft.com/WindowsXP/expertzone/columns/honeycutt/02october07.asp
You can try putting the win XP cd in the CD rom then when you boot the computer press F8 repeatedly until it asks you if you want to boot from the CD. Say yes the either go through the repair steps or just reinsall XP. If you have data you can't afford to lose on the HD don't do this. (Sometimes XP won't let you out of repair with out formatting the drive) Put it back in your other machine and back it up.