replace hard drive or reinstall XP
 

Thanks for the obvious advice but a Mac is not in the budget.

For those still with me, a 2009 vintage Dell Vostro 200 minitower at the office died. I can boot into safe mode and do as I please but it hangs while booting into regular mode. It'll go as far as loading most of the stuff that has icons by the clock then I'll have a pointer cursor that moves but does nothing or an hourglass cursor that moves but does nothing. chkdsk says 0 bad sectors. Using 40GB of a 320GB HD. It sounds to my novice mind like the HD is fine but there's a problem with XP. Thoughts?

Sixto
87 300D^2

Can you check the event logs (System) in Safe Mode for disk errors?

If there are no disk errors and chkdsk works fine, I'd reinstall.

Repairing Windows XP in Eight Commands « Icrontic

This link may start you on your way to what you need. There are programs to repair Windows that may help. If you have the original XP distribution disks it will probably help. Look at the Microsoft website too.

Give me a sick 603 any day :(

Getting back to it today, I tried twice to boot safe mode to check the event logs. It hangs loading mup.sys then presents a blue screen with UNMOUNTABLE BOOT VOLUME. Trying the recovery features now...

Sixto
87 300D^2

fixboot solved the unmountable boot volume problem. I disabled win.ini and load startup items in msconfig and it booted properly. I enabled win.ini keeping load startup items disabled and it hung while booting. So it looks like win.ini is the culprit.

Sixto
87 300D^2

At work I'm about to spend a couple grand upgrading my Dell T7500: 24Gb RAM, RAID5 SCSI drives (4TB), 256Gb solid state drive and a 2nd monitor to replace my aging CRT, which is beginning to dim and hum when running 3d (have been running beyond spec refresh rate).

At home I use Macs.

Sounds like the way to go, Bot. I got another HD as a boot drive and kept the old HD for the data files on it. The Exchange parameters are at the office so I won't know until tomorrow if Outlook remains flaky... which is what started me hating the world in the first place. Whatever was the root of problem I described in the OP degraded over half a day to where the PC wouldn't boot at all. It would stop at a blue screen with a C000021a error or something like that whether booting in safe or regular mode. I don't know if the OS or HD went south but the new HD and fresh XP installation is humming nicely. I hope I'm not taxing the power supply with 2 HDs. Thanks for everyone's patience and help.

Sixto
87 300D^2

2HDs won't hurt it at all.

If you want to do some preventative maintenance then you should definitely look into "ICD Thermal Paste" It's diamond based and drops processor temps by around 5°-10°. I run it on all my machines.