Last night I attempted to uninstall Vista and replace it with XP. I got Vista removed successfully, but at some point during the setup of XP, the computer restarted and was stuck at the very first splash screen (Alienware screen). If I press DEL within a second of the splash screen appearing, I get some BIOS information. It detects my CD Drive and my HDD, but then it stops with code 0078 at the bottom right of the screen. If I press F8 while viewing this info, a line appears that says "BOOT selection popup menu selected", but nothing happens.

I tried removing the CMOS battery for several minutes, no change.
I tried booting from several different disks, and nothing happens.
If you let it sit at the splash screen for more than a second or two, it freezes, and you can't even press DEL anymore.

I thought the HDD might be bad, but when I do get to the BIOS info screen, it says SMART shows the drive is enabled and status is OK.

I'm assuming it has something to do with a corrupted OS, but I have no idea how to fix it aside from buying a new HDD and doing a clean install.

Please HELP!Have you tried a bootable CD or DVD like Knoppix on this system to see if the system will behave as LONG as it doesnt try to boot from the HD?


 Downloading and burning Knoppix to a CD or DVd and booting your system off of it can tell you if your system is healthy for motherboard and power supply etc. If healthy then you can perform a low level format of the HD or delete the partition, and then build XP off of the HD without its Partition Table, the system will create a new partition table as if it was a clean new drive and the build should go fine as long as you dont have RAID drivers issues with XP install etc.I tried booting from an Ubuntu Live! CD. It still gets to the splash screen, the CD drive spins a little and the CD activity light flashes a bit, but then it just hangs there. It sounds to me that the CD/DVD drive is the issue here...
Borrow a KNOWN good one and swap it in there to see if this helps or not.Ok, I figured out how to fix it. The problem was that the OS on the HDD was corrupt, and I had to get the computer booted into a CD before it recognized the HDD. I put the solution at the following link:

http://boredprojects.blogspot.com/2008/07/stuck-before-boot-screen.html

Thanks for the help guys.This doesn't make sense....Ubuntu Live should have booted.I know, it was very odd. Ubuntu Live! did boot, but only after I had removed the HDD. I'm not sure what the mechanism was, but the HDD was somehow messing with the boot sequence. Whenver the HDD was installed, it would freeze at the boot screen. Without the HDD, it defaulted to the CD to boot.

Very weird.