The most messed up PC I've ever seen.

Here's the deal.

Yesterday afternoon, I got some sort of permissions error when I tried to go to the control panel in windows. Wierd I thought...not to mention that it then proceeded to remove itself from the start menu. I went to windows explorer and found it again and got the same message.

Odd..

I reboot. Goes through memory check, finds all devices and then just before it goes to the windows loading screen, bam... reboots again.

Perhaps the windows registry got corrupted somehow...

No matter, I pop in a data retrevial disk and load that up and go save all my data on the C drive. Then I do a disk wipe (essentially a glorified defrag).

Pop the windows XP cd in and reboot. Goes to boot from CD and then goes to check system hardware. Before it goes any further, it reboots again. It won't go past the hardware checking.

Now I'm ****ed.

Insert the ultimate boot disk to check for memory/hard drive errors. None.

Unplug the other HDD, same thing
Unplug CD rom and try to boot from USB cd rom, tries and then says "NTLDR missing"
Swapped Video card (incase it was something with that causing the problem) nope.

I have no freaking clue what is wrong. I've unplugged every device, reset the bios, updated teh bios, and still the same thing.

Any help or ideas would be much appreciated.

update, I pulled all the ram and put one of the sticks in slot 3 rather than 1 so at the moment, it's only got 1 stick in it.

goes to check hardware and gives this message

Award BootBlock BIOS v1.0

BIOS ROM checksum error

"Detecting floppy drive A media...
Drive A error. System Halt"

All while'st the system speaker is going nuts.'

Boot with the XP cd and go into the recovery console, then type chkdsk /f

I've seen this several times and usually ends up being a problem with the MBR on the hard drive, chkdsk will fix it. either way, won't hurt to try.

see, that's the problem. It reboots before it goes to the windows repair stuff. When I tell it to boot from the CD, it does and then says "setup is inspecting your hardware" and then it just reboots.

Would deleting the partition (there's only 1) and re-doing it with fdisk solve this?

Your cpu may be overheating. I had the issue some years back when trying to install.

MUAHAHAH!!!! It worked!! Thanks for the tip man. I had the datalifeguard disk for the drive next in line of cd's to try. It slipped my mind that the disk wipe doesn't destroy the partition (like I think it should).