Reversion problems

[ULC]

Desperate times call for desperate measures..and I thought that's what a recovery drive was for .

[Whacker]

/shrug

Go nuts I say, esp. if you don't have any data to lose. You can always reinstall. Hopefully you get this working soon, maybe someone else can chip in.

At this point I have clearly failed in my duties to our Lord Prosimian and shall be committing Seppuku shortly. May his reign be long and glorious.

[ULC]

Not yet please! Well, the above solution didn't work, and I just had a rather weird experience. I decided to open it up and add another drive to see if it was the original drives fault. To test it, I left the other one plugged in. Lo and behold as it froze every time it tried to load. I could only manage safe mode, so I decided to remove the older drive, and viola, it loads. Sadly, the newer drive doersn;t even handle CD's...grrr....the only thing that works is my burned vista recovery DVD...yeah, and no other disk works...

[Whacker]

Sounds like you nailed it then. If you replaced the original problem drive with an older one that's working fine, sounds like your original has or is in the middle of going bad. Just use your older driver or snag a nice 20$ bargain off of Newegg.

[ULC]

Nope, neither drive is working , yet the new one will read the Vista recovery disk with no problem but won;t touch anything else...

[Whacker]

Oops, ok then. I apparently misunderstood, and I just saw your edits. So how did you go about reinstalling XP? Did you install from scratch using a retail XP copy, or did you have some kind of prebuilt OS image courtesy of Gateway that you seem to mention? Also, is this thing still under warranty?