Strange Crash

I was booting XP the other day and when my desktop was displayed, the system dropped to original boot. I had installed Service Pack 1 not too long before

This happened several times and I could not get to SAFE MODE, could not get to any position where I could use my CDRom to try to get XP to do any kind of repair.

I was forced to format my partition, install WIN98 before I could reinstall XP and had to completely set up my entire system from scratch. But did not install that Service Pack
Fortunately, I never install software save data on the C: partition but, of course, had to reinstall most of my software

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OK, NOW yesterday, it happened again and I had to give up for the night. This morning I booted and everything seemed OK. I installed Norton Util and did whatever repairs it showed. An hour ago, it got into that loop again but fortunately resusitated after only two tries.

I dont have much installed and no shareware that I have not been using for several months.

 

At a guess, bad memory stick or heat.

 

"I was forced to format my partition, install WIN98 before I could reinstall XP and had to completely set up my entire system from scratch. "

Why did you install 98 first? This makes it an upgrade, rather than a clean installation, which is far more prone to problems. Before you get too far, you might consider just installing XP to a clean drive.

 

If I did not have an older version of windows, I could not run SETUP which will not run from a DOS command line.

I do not have the full XP, muchmore expensive, only the upgrade of Windows for approx $90

 

Well, tenbob , at the risk of having you slap yourself, the upgrade CD does contain the full installation. And, it can be started from a DOS boot disk, too.

The best way to start the installation is to boot from CD. During setup, it will ask you to insert your old 98 CD for a moment to be sure you are qualified for the "upgrade" and then it will proceed, installing the full version of XP, leaving all the junk from a previous OS behind.

If you can't boot from CD, you can make the 6-floppy installation set from here:
Home
http://download.microsoft.com/download/WinXPHome/Install/310994/WIN98MeXP/EN-US/WinXP_EN_HOM_BF.EXE
Pro
http://download.microsoft.com/download/whistler/Install/310994/WIN98MeXP/EN-US/WinXP_EN_PRO_BF.EXE

There is also the single floppy installation option. You can use a Win98/ME startup disk or one that loads smartdrv (a caching utility that speeds setup) and start setup from the CD by typing X:\i386\winnt at the command prompt (where "X" is your CD drive letter).
A boot disk containing smartdrv can be found here: http://www.mirrors.org/archived_software/www.bootdisk.com/xpfiles/xpboot.exe

I think you'll find that installing cleanly without going through 98 first will solve a lot of problems.

PS. You don't need to format or fdisk before the XP installation, either. During setup of XP, you will be given options to add or remove partitions, resize them, and choose NTFS or FAT32.

This is somewhat OT, and Newt may well be right about that memory stick. My belief is that by doing a clean installation, you may eliminate other possible causes of errors.