XP restarts before logo

yo

this has been a problem for approx 3 days now, and i'm seriosuly running out of possible solutions. I have however narrowed down the possible causes a fair bit.

the problem is, simply, that an install of XP hoem on a given harddrive restarts automatically just before the point when the windows logo with the loading bar would appear. I havegone through each option from F8, but each time the same thing happend.

it is not caused by the hardware that the box was in as 1. another os ( slackware) runs through it fine and 2. it causes the same effect when the drive is inside another machine.

it is not caused by the drive itself ( I believe) because i was able to run scandisk on someone else computer while it was not running as a system disk, and no problems (or viruseses) were found; I was also able (still at it) to migrate the data on the disk to DVD Rs.

I have tried replacing SAM, SOFTWARE SYSTEM and DEFAULT registry keys as reccommended by microsft, and have even tried replacing kernel 32.dll to no avail.

as such, i'm stuck.

the possible cause is that it shutdown untidily the last time it worked, as it has been doing that fairly often recently, but I dont know how to rectify it. Possibly, it thinks that its supposed to be ain a state of shutdwon/restart and doesnt know to stop ?

I would rather not haev to completely reinstall windows ( since I dont own it, the disc drive has an OEM install nested within which requries me to completely wipe the machine and start again at sp1) and while slackware is fine and all, it doesnt run mark of chaos worth a damn.

so halp, pls. ^^

 

The only thing I can think of right now... is boot and push F8 again (same way you got to safe mode) except select "Last Known Good Configuration"
You should be able to see that as an option, and if that doesn't work... i'm not sure what else to tell you.

 

first thing I tried; nothing happened :|

 

Have you tried a restore??

hmm... Give me some time to think of something else... you've got me right now though.

 

i should like to, but the drive was the large hat wearer of my harddrives, and has all the system restore points in itself

I'll certainly look for system restore outwith the host system.

also tried removing automatically restart on crash or whatever its caloled under the registry; it was set to 0 already.

and tried checking that the page file was large enough.