I like XP, but recently my unholy POS Dell (the main, family computer) completely went off the rocker. It tells me to insert a bootdisk when I try to start it...even though I never told it to boot from a disk. Even when I disable the floppy drive through the BIOS (not just from the boot sequence, but literally take its entry out) it tries to find one. Hell, I don't even think it CHECKS the floppy drive. It never makes a peep from the floppy drive, and when I tried to stick a bootable Partition Magic floppy in there it wouldn't load (Still asked for a bootable disk - lol).
Not to mention it doesn't even realize that there's a CD drive attached. I set it up to boot from the CD drive first, and run the XP setup disk to see what's wrong, but it refuses to.
The great thing is that the hard drive only registers when it feels like it. PM8 can't find it, and another bootdisk I found wouldn't run fdisk or format, for lack of a drive. I think it's because I switched to NTFTS. Never doing that again. Not if I need tools from my XP disk that the computer can't find, anyhow.
But like I said, the drive registers whenever it feels like it. Sometimes I'll hit the reset button a few times and it'll start loading XP. It'll sometimes get a little past the login screen, and then it'll do a core dump (which I've yet to figure out how to get to) and triple-fault back to asking for a bootdisk.
Twice I've been able to get it into safe mode by resetting the computer during an XP boot, but once I started safemode with networking and it immediately core dumped (after taking an agonizingly long time to log in....actually, it never actually logged completely in. It said "loading personal settings" for about 30 mins and then dumped), but when I started safe mode without networking it worked fine. I'd tried setting it to a restore point from the 12th, but it still won't boot.
Oh well. My parents are getting a new computer now...this thing was a POS anyhow. I'm TRYING to make sure they don't get a pre-packaged crap-fest (like they're telling me they want.."but they're reliable...we don't want you to get hand-made "parts"" - good Lord my parents are idiots) like this one, which my dad ordered as a surprise without telling me..."Surpise! We're replacing our awesome Gateway with a billion times worse Dell!...why don't you look happy?"
Just venting....oy.
