I am having a quite serious issue now where I get the blue screen to death during boot. I get a blue screen also when I try to boot in Safe mode but this time it says that sptd.sys is the issue..something about the image being pagable instead of nonpagable. Either way, I cannot get to the DOS prompt to make any changes etc. It does ask me to press ESC to skip loading 'sptd.sys' during safe boot, I do that but it still gives me the blue screen and sptd.sys error. I have surmised that sptd.sys is a daemon tools driver/file.

I did run all hard drive diagnostics and it passes all of them. I ran total computer diagnostics without any failures.

I can only find my XP Home OEM CD (Dell) and have tried to boot from it and it works but it doesnt see my hard drive. It is SATA and apparently it doesnt have drivers.

So, I made a floppy with the Intel SATA drivers and add that during the CD boot (F6) and when I try to go to the Recovery console, it says 'examing 152587mb disk 0 @ id 0 on bus 0 on iastor....'..just sits there (for over a day actually until I turned it off)

I have tried multiple boot CD options..including slipsteaming the OEM CD with the drivers, that didnt work. I tried to update the CD to SP2, that didnt work but gave me a new error, said my usbehci.sys was corrupt. I tried a BartPE boot CD but it required SP1 or 2 and with SP2 it gives me the above usb error.

This seems impossibly difficult! How can I just get to the "C" prompt to run a chkdsk or fixboot etc? Is there software I can get or buy that could help?

My last resort is to give up and buy a new hard drive and probably a new version of Windows (since I cannot find my original XP MCE OEM CD) and just salvage the data from the old hard drive as a slave.

HELP!
thx!
Jim