Hello, on a friends system xp won't load, it gets to the splash with the loading bar and it just continues to animate the loading bar (never freezes) but never actually loads (have left it doing this over night).
Also it won't go into safe mode, and last known good results in the same loading bar fiasco.
System is based on an e6400 which was o'ced to 3ghz (although temperatures were always fine with the arctic freezer 7 pro, kept at well < 50c 95% of the time), a gigabyte 965p socket 775 mboard, 2gb of 800mhz overclockable ram (running at about 900mhz). System was stable according to stress tests and never over heated.
At first I thought it might be the ram since I initially ruled out a cpu problem because it seemed to run stuff ok, just didn't load windows, I mean it never froze. I ran about 6 or 7 passes of memtest, nothing, passed everything fine.
So I guess it could be the ram (although memtest says thats ok), the cpu (although it's not freezing) or the mboard. At the mo I would say it's the mboard. The only other info I have is that just before this problem started the bios settings reverted to factory and when I oc'd it again the system would not boot stably and it reverted itself to factory again, so basically it wouldn't take the oc anymore. A few days after this the problem started. Considering this it might be cpu, what do people think?
Also, how do I ever really diagnose (without having a load of parts) where this kind of problem actually lies? Any kit that can help?
Anyway, developments, I stuck another hd in and installed xp on that (performance edition, installed in 15 mins! Wicked!), then I put the old hard disks in, the old system partition was inaccessible, was flagged as dirty, running a check disk on every startup. Did a fdisk /f, sorted that out, all old data accessible again, PLUS the system is now fine again with the OC back to 3ghz from 2.1 running cool, weird but I ain't complaining. Not sure how an apparent os problem wouldn't even let it get to the bios splash while oc'd but now it's fine??? No bios update or anything...
