startup freezing on 'starting up' screen

I'm in trouble (computer trouble) again!!

On start up, my PC stops/freezes on this screen. I've tried starting in safe mode but it still locks up on this screen.

Any ideas of where to start with diagnostics? Oh by the way, I don't have a recovery disc.
http://i111.photobucket.com/albums/n129/forum_pix/winxppro-1.jpg

 

Without an XP disc, it's going to be fairly difficult to do anything. I would recommend build a UBCD4Win ( the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows) but it requires a Windows CD for the building process. If you've tried booting using the Last Known Good Configuration and that didn't work, and you said Safe Mode didn't work, then I'm not sure there's much more we can do. If you have the option to boot into the recovery console, we can try some things there, but again, if the recovery console hasn't been installed, the only way to get to it is from, you guessed it, a Windows CD.

Sorry, I know this isn't much help, but without the CD, I can't think of a thing you can do.

 

As an option. Could you do something with another PC... create a boot disc for the PC that's having issues.

 

Yes, but I already considered that.... you'd still need an XP install disc to create the necessary boot discs. You could try removing the drive from the PC that's having problems, slave it to a healthy PC, and run chkdsk F: /r on it, where F: is the letter of the problematic drive. You can also run a bootable hard drive diagnostic on the problematic PC, you can download the correct program from the drive maker's web site, but I don't think it's a hard drive problem.

 

in line with what you said... could i use the XP disc from the healthy PC? i'm thinking will that become a license issue?!