xp pro won't reinstall after crash

Comp froze, when rebooted I got the black screen with options of how to start windows. No matter which option I try (last good conf, safe mode, comm prompt) it goes directly to the blue screen. I'm running xp pro and tried booting from cd to reinstall. Once it begins set up and I hit enter to install it freezes when it gets to examining the hard disk. I thought about creating a partition but I can't get into command prompt. I don't care about recovering any data, just getting it running again. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

Sounds very, very much like a broken hard drive... You would need a new HDD, and propably even a new copy of Windows, if that's the case.. I guess others will give some other options for the reason of that misbehaviour...

 

Have you tried booting to safe mode? (with Xp tap the f8 key when you see the logo for the mfg.)
vicks

 

Reinstalling will not solve the original problem. You need to find out why it crashed in the first place and fix that. Memory and hard drive are the first things to check out.

MemScope (Floppy and CD images.)
Microsoft Memory Test (floppy or CD ISO image)
Memtest86

If you have enough memory sticks, you can test them by removing one at a time and see if the problem disappears.

If you are running Vista and can boot up, go to Start > Search and type:

mdsched.exe

Choose to run a memory diagnostic on next boot. Or, you can boot from the DVD and run it from there.