[PewterScreaminMach]

First off, I did read through the sticky at the top and tried the suggested fixes with no luck.

My problem can be summarized as follows: I built the computer January 2008 and have had no real issues since then. The other day, I decided to run NVIDIA nTune (software that came with the motherboard which tests and optimizes performance to a SAFE level) and the first time I ran it, it closed automatically by itself (got one of those "nTune needs to close" messages). No big deal, so I ran it again and it worked fine, but I forgot to save the settings as a profile for later use when I closed it, so I decided to run it a third time.

Now, when running this softare, it clearly states that your system will "crash and restart", possibly multiple times, because it's testing some hardware limits, but this is totally normal and it will resume testing on startup. So in this third time, it crashed and restarted itself like usual (it had done so previous times, as well), but upon startup, it gets to the multi-shades of blue "Windows XP" screen that appear right before you log on to your Windows profile and it never gets any farther. The mouse moves around like normal but that's it.

I tried restarting a few more times, no luck. Then I tried F8 and "Last known good configuration" with no luck. I tried booting in Safe Mode and it brought up the totally black screen with "Safe Mode" around the edges, but then went back to the blue Windows XP logo screen like before with no luck. Lastly, I tried booting from the Windows XP cd and repairing, as it says to do in the third section of this forum's sticky, but after the whole "new" install/repair process, which runs normally, it still just goes to that screen and stays there.

Any thoughts? I only have about half the stuff on the hard drive backed up (stupid, I'm well aware) because I didn't order a second hard drive yet that's big enough since I got my new HD video camera. Obviously I haven't reformatted the drive yet but if there wasn't a ton of stuff on it I want to get off, I already would have just to save myself the hassle of trying to figure this out. I'm just kind of pissed because this NVIDIA software came with the computer and is supposed to make it run optimally SAFELY. It's not like it's some random, suspicious software I downloaded.

Also, it doesn't seem to make sense that this program would affect Windows files since it just messes with hardware settings and stuff, not Windows registry files or anything. Another note would be that my network connection was disabled when I ran this software and I had previously run Spybot and MalwareBytes with no issues found, so I can't see it being a virus.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Anyone see an issue like this before? Feel free to ask questions if you have them.

[PewterScreaminMach]

Hmm, so the hard drive won't show up after I plug it into a new computer in the My Computer window. It will still get to that Windows XP screen and stay there if I install it as the boot hard drive, but it won't go any farther. Can anyone think of a way for me to backup the files on this hard drive before reformatting it?

What will happen to the files on the hard drive if I actually install a new version of windows instead of just running the Repair option on the Windows XP cd?

[PewterScreaminMach]

In case anyone reading cares to know, I was able to boot the system using a CD I created with UBCD4Win and my XP Pro disc, then backup my files to an external hard drive from there. I was also able to get the drive to show up as a second hard drive on the other computer (turns out the SATA port was disabled in the BIOS), although the folders were inaccessible that way because they were in an Admin user profile.