PC won't boot after installing chipset drivers
 

K, here is what happend:

PC stopped booting in Windows (was up to date with the drivers and Windows updates) so I did a format.

Without the NV 6.68 chipset drivers, it booted fine and I made a backupof the data partition. But as soon as I installed the latest chipset drivers, which worked fine before, it hangs even before the splash screen with a black screen.

The System is a 4400+ with XP SP2 on a Gigabyte K8N PRO SLI and I have no idea what is going wrong.

Can you get into windows with safe mode?

I tried holding F8 but it didn't work.

hmmm; that should be able to come up, it loads before the OS

Yes but what can it be, it puzzels me as I haven't done anything today and bam it doesn't work and even the reinstall doesn't work anymore.

problem doesn't seem to be software in this case; can be multiple things, hard drive badly partition/corrupt, ram corrupt, too high OC, soo many possibilities.

try stripping system down to bare minimum, run stock speeds, than try again;

I reinstalled again, installed the chipset drivers without the SW one and installed the windows updates.

After a reinstall I got into safe mode now, but it only shows me a DOS page with file directories?

I also had a weird DOS error pop up when I got into XP.

when you enter safe mode it'll ask if you are sure to continue, if you hit no it'll give you the recovery console = like dos window;)

nope, it almost looks like it gives an error message that it can't find those files

Would be using a the FIXMBR command in the recovery tool a good idea?

memtest shows no errors as well

that's only good if you can not even start windows (unable to locate the system/boot drive); don't think it will fix this though

hmmm, the Windows-CD cannot do a low-level format

I guess that is proof that the HD is fubar?

since when can windows do a low level format? true a low level format tool for the disk manufacturer's website

well, it wasn't a quick format like with partition magic

windows can't do low level format ;) you need a special tool for that, which is provided by your HDD manufacturer, it's through boot disk and dos-like interface

Still, does the error windows gives me indicate the harddisk is done? It cannot even finish the format of this partition.

it can be that the MBR is screwed, that index is screwed, that partition table is screwed, "software" issues; if the drive fails low level format (through dos-tool) you can say it's toast...

I have recovered a few drives now which did not work in Windows, but after low level format were as good as new. Problems consisted of very low transfer rates and "file not found" errors.

well, it seems it was the MBR as it got through this time after fixmbr

What could be the reason the MBR got bad?

simple system crash in the middle of write process is enough to screw things up, 99.9% it's nothing too bad, 0.1% it was right in the middle of the MBR write update...

sigh, the error returned I am really about to rip the HD out

low level format the HDD, that don't work, throw it out

interesting, looks like it was a virus

the complete format erased it from my HD but now I'm checking my external HD and it finds about 100 infected files on my DATA folder