Graphics card/Windows xp trouble

[deww]

Hey,
I am having some trouble pc wise and im mindboggled, first off heres my pc info:

Athlon 64bit 3200+ processor
K8N_Neo4-F MSI motherboard
1.5gigs of memory
Nvidia 7800Gt graphic card 128 mb
Windows Xp Pro SP2
2x 200Gb SATA hard drives

Ok here's what happened, i'm a fanatic gamer and was playing my favourite wow.
All of sudden my framerate dropped from 30 to 2. I thought i'd try shutting it down and restarting to see what it did, when i tabbed back to windows all the icons were huge with choppy colours (basically like i was using some 1980's Graph. Card).

Clearly something wasnt right and there wasnt much i could do but to restart my pc.
So... that's what i did, only touble is it only gets as far as the windows loading screen then restarts itself, almost like key files had been deleted or something.
I immediatly thought it was a virus but im not sure what virus could affect my G card like that. I just cant get it started up and i will have to format and reinstall i'm clear about that. But i would like to know what could do this so i can perhaps avoid it in the future.
(EDIT: O btw, i have tried my Graphics card on a different pc and it works just fine so thats not the problem)
Thanks in Advance.

 

[Matthew DeCarlo]

..You might not have to reinstall Windows.

Try booting with the "Last Known Good Configuration" and if that doesn't work, try booting with "Safe Mode".

If you get in with "Safe Mode", uninstall your video card's drivers via the Device Manager (Start > Run > devmgmt.msc > Ok) and then try getting back into Windows normally, where you can continue on with installing the latest drivers for your video card.

If neither "Last Know Good Configuration" or "Safe Mode" result in a successful boot, try running a repair installation of Windows completely reinstalling.

 

[deww]

Nope

Thats what i thought of doing but nope ive done all that, anything i do doesnt matter it always restarts. Ooo and when i try repair it says theres no windows installed o.O it seems to have been wiped, how and why i dont know.

 

[Matthew DeCarlo]

It's virtually impossible to tell you how to avoid "it" in the future, see, because "it" is unknown.

Either figure out what "it" is, or stick around until someone does. Otherwise, just cross your fingers and hope that "it" doesn't show itself again .

Sounds to me like some form of serious infestation/corruption, but, it might be hardware related.

 

[deww]

Yea thats what i was thinking also, maybe its just my hardrive acting up. One thing we can all learn from this is, BACKUP your shizn.. Anyways thanks for the input but i doubt anyone will figure it out. just thought id give it a go, cheers.

 

[Matthew DeCarlo]

...Your data is still retrievable. You don't have to boot into Windows on that HDD in order to save your "shizn".

Either attach the drive to another PC as a Secondary/Slave device or take a look at the Knoppix LiveCD.

 

[deww]

I have 2 disks all of them will do to reinstall windows but i will always lose some data as they all have valuable data on them, as for another pc i could give it a go and try it that way. good plan. I was also just thinking, i cant post links so if you could look up my mainboard on the msi site there are a few rules concerning memory, i have 3 Dual side ddr 400 in slots 1,2,3. But the rules say there should be 4 could this perhaps cause a serious error like this?