UNTIL... I put in my last new piece of hardware... a Geforce 4 from Creative labs.

On booting I got "NTLDR missing". (ON INSERTING A GRAPHICS CARD???!!!).
Put back my old card and everything works fine.

Put my old hard disk in with win98 and the the NEW graphics card works fine.

I've tried re-installing XP with the geforce4 in but it gives "NTLDR missing" on rebooting DURING the installation.

Booting from the XP CD and using recover doesn't make any difference.

I made a boot disk which works ok with my old graphics card, put in the new one and i get HAL.DLL is missing or corrupt.

My opinion.

Get rid of the card. First off, go ahead and scan through this board. Do a search. You will see everyone has problems with these GeForce cards. Find yourself a nice ATI Radeon or alike video card to make you happy.

Fact.

You did NOT loose data or destroy your operating system. Don't bother attempting another reinstall. It won't help until you get the card replaced. Your computer will boot normally with a different card. It is also possible that the card was purchase defective! If you really cannot part with your new video card, then try moving the controller card to another PCI slot. You may also have a motherboard that can manually assign IRQ's. However, if you get it to boot, WindowsXP (with the APCI HAL) will change the IRQ back to its original assignment and cause your computer to freeze.

Hope I helped. Feel free to post back. And please, understand that my opinion is simply based on everyone else's problems and complaints.