Winxp Home upgrade to Win98SE and *&#%*&

[boomerang]

I tried to upgrade my HP Pavilion w/ PIII 600Mhz Win98SE to Winxp Home and have gotten into a mess. After the install was complete and the system reboote my PC got into a loop checking for inconsistencies in th HDD, rebooting and checking again and rebooting ad nausem. In trying to fix this by trying to recover the Win98SE and repairing Winxp Home I have gotten to where I cannot get into my PC at all. It is now in a loop of booting to safe mode choice screen and no matter what I choose it reboots and comes bac to the safe mode choices screen. My question is--is there any way to solve this priblem where I can get into my PC and save my data? Or failing that where can I go to get step-by-step instructions to remove the HDD from the old computer and install it as a slave into another computer? I am using another computer to send this post as I cannot get into my other PC.

 

[nork]

By removing extra hardware that you dont totally have to have, and by resetting the bios, you should be able to get this puppy to boot up. But make sure the bios reset is done exactly as per the mobo mfgr manual.

I have had this happen to me too often, so before i do any win xp install i use the "zero-fill" program that is built into the diagnostic hardware of all hard drives. Each mfgr has their own diagnostic software but inside one will find the "zero write or zero fill" program.
You can do it from a cdrom but i use a win98 boot disk to get to dos and then i use the hard drive diagnostic on floppy. You can also do this using the win xp recovery console.

The reason for this is that hard drives pick up viruses in the master boot record for one, and there are other things that happen to hard drives. The zero-write prog essentially returns the hard drive to same condition and specs as when it left the factory, minus only the wear on the drive.

This eliminates a lot of the problems of installing win xp, but not all of them, but its a good start.
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