Windows XP freezes after boot sequence but just before log in screen

The computer freezes as I said in the title at a screen with a blue background and two bars above and below a windows logo. These bars are orange and yellow and the scroll horizontally. Booting in safe-mode and debug-mode bring me to the same screen and attempting to launch from an xp disk to repair brings me to this screen before prompting me to boot from the disk. I have tested some things and I am ledd to believe it is a display driver of some sort. Any ideas? The computer is a dell with xp home sp2. It is my friends dad's and neither are to savy with computers so they had no idea what could have been the cause. Is there any way to step by step boot xp? I tried hooking it up to my computer buut it couldn't recognize the hard drive but this could simply be that they are formatted differently, which I haven't checked for. I also tried switching out the AGP NVidia graphics card for a PCI ATI card and this was to no avail.

Thanks for the help in advanced.

 

Hi tmaak. If you suspect that this is a driver problem, perhaps you should post this somewhere other than the Viruses section. However, I advise you to try and get a PC Doctor boot CD or something like that which benchmarks your hardware, which might be able to diagnose the problem. Or, a boot CD which allows you to run Windows (kind of) before Windows starts (like http://www.diskinternals.com/boot-cd/) can enable you to install, or reinstall, a display driver.

Cheers

 

If you have done any "partitioning", "cloning" etc type of work on the computer, sometimes the drive letters on the C: drive can change. If that happens windows xp will hang just before the logon screen.

you can try the following demo below to check your drive letters.
http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/downloads/JustBoot_Boot_Corrector_38938_p/


The only programs that can fix a drive letter problem is a "bartpe" with "savepart" plugin, and also paragon partition manager v9.0 has a built-in boot corrector.

Most windows xp problems can be fixed. If the drive letters checked good, you might want to run a chkdsk c:\f command from the windows installation cd to fix any corrupted system files.

Also if you don't have a backup of the hard drive, you can use the demo of easyimage to make one. This way if you damage anything important while doing repairs you at least have a backup.