Since you say it freezes and doesn't blue screen or complain about not being able to find the harddrive, it's not a harddrive or controller problem. When booting into Safe Mode, Video driver initialization comes next after you see the acpitabl.dat entry. "Generally" if it's freezing at that part, the OS can't switch to GUI mode for setup or OS, which generally indicates bad/corrupted video drivers, or a bad video card. Have you tried booting into Safe Mode Command Prompt? Does that work? Ocassionally, it's a memory chip issue and rarely is it a motherboard problem. However, the 2600's have onboard video, so it might be a motherboard problem Try the memory mix/match game & see if you can get it to boot. Probably not likely, but for the sake of thoroughness.... And all else, run the Dell Diagnostic's CD for your model. That will pretty much tell you where the problem lies... providing you can get it to run. Scott
________________________________ From: Ben Scott [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wed 2/11/2009 8:21 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Windows 2003 wont boot up help!!! On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 4:29 PM, Dennis Rogov <[email protected]> wrote: > If i try to load a windows 2003 CD it freezes once it says loading windows at > the bottom Hardware fault of some kind. Others have suggested the disk subsystem, but if it was the disk subsystem I would not expect the CD to puke at that stage. It's not really looking at the disk yet, except maybe to get the partition table. If the partition table was poison, Windows wouldn't even get to the point where it could complain about a particular file. (Disk subsystem = IDE/SATA/SCSI/RAID controller, physical disks, cables, disk backplane if any.) Faulty CPU, RAM, or motherboard can cause just about any kind of symptom in the world. You say it's a Dell. Download Dell's diagnostics and run the full suite. > ... dies when it tries to load acpitabl.dat file... That *may* indicate a problem with the motherboard. That file name must be short for "ACPI table", and ACPI is how the OS talks to the motherboard and main BIOS services. However, I'm reasoning on really weak evidence here, so I wouldn't put much stock in it. It could easily be something else, and the file name is just a coincidence. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
