My computer is currently stuck in a rebooting loop~

[BentoBox]

My computer had been experiencing some trouble lately; notably some registry values changing randomly from time to time (I had a program who warned me of such changes). It started to crash in a very odd way too just about a week ago: The screen would turn black and strides of blue would cover the screen:

And such crashes wouldn't be initiated by any reckless behavior on my end, it would happen randomly (i.e. browsing the web, working on an excel sheet...)
I thought it might've been related to my GPU (integrated) but I just brushed it off as restarting the computer would "fix" the problem.

I went to my parent's this weekend and left my computer on... When coming back, my computer had just rebooted and I figured it must've been a forced reboot from a windows update... but it froze on the loading screen right before the login screen. Rebooted once, froze at the same point. Rebooted a second time and this light blue screen came up; some files had apparently been corrupted and it was going to attempt to fix the problem, and so it scanned my Hard Drive and retrieved the "orphan" files. My comp was working again. But it was noticeably slower, some shortcuts did not lead to their assigned file, all the addons on my FireFox had been uninstalled... I downloaded a registry cleaner tool (Euser registry cleaner) and let it do its thing. Everything was fine from then onwards...

Till yesterday when it crashed on me, again, while I was working on a research project (ms word).

Same black&blue screen.

And so I rebooted my comp, hoping for another miraculous save but I wasn't so lucky this time around.

Chassis intruded!
Fatal Error... System Halted.

I have no idea what that means. What chassis?

Then came the screen where it asks you in which mode you'd want to boot windows (safe mode, sm w/ network, sm w/ command prompt, last known good config, start windows normally), and every single option brought me back to that very same screen. I am caught in a loop. Having lost my legit XP cd (disk 1 of 2 actually), I dwled XP and burnt the iso on a DVD (bad I know, but that's not the point) and tried to boot from said DVD but it wouldn't recognize it... The disk would spin in the tray and then... nothing. The computer would just reboot and ask me again in which mode I'd like to boot windows... I pressed del after rebooting and made my disk drive the only drive from which my computer could boot from... but it then asked me to actually insert a disk even though there already was one in the tray...

Would anyone happen to know just wth happened to my computer? =[ Could it be a virus? And at this point, if my computer refuses to boot from the disk drive... what options do I have left...?

Thanks a lot!

edit: Is the fact that I burnt the ISO on a DVD a problem? Should I have used a CD instead? Also, I forgot to mention that I burnt the iso on a computer @ my university and I tried burning it using iso-burner, BurnCDCC, CDBurnerXP... I even tried real player and neither of these programs would actually detect the burner. There was this one program installed on the computer called Roxis and it was the only program that would actually detect it and burn successfully~ I don't know if any of that is relevant to the problem at hand... but I'd like to know if there is something specific that needs to be done for a burnt CD to be bootable or if they all should be? And if my disk drivers were damaged somehow, is there another way to actually force a reinstall?

 

[TheBuzzSaw]

Can you still access your BIOS?

 

[BentoBox]

Yeah, I can.

Ok, so burning the iso on a CD did work and my disk drive was able to detect it, joy. So the windows installation fires up, it starts loading all the necessary DLLs and whatnot... and after all of that is done, it freezes upon "loading windows setup" or something along those lines.... I am then being told that, and I quote:

"Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer.

Make sure any hard disk drives are powered on and properly connected to your computer, and that any disk-related hardware configuration is correct. This may involve running a manufacturer supplied diagnostic or setup program.

Setup cannot continue. To quit Setup, press F3."

...

Went to my BIOS and the HD was indeed detected... Opened the case and the connection were fine, obviously. So what now?

 

[TheBuzzSaw]

Well, this is just me, but you might try installing some other OS temporarily just to see if it fares better at locating the HD. You'll lose all your data, but you might get your computer back. If I were in your exact predicament, I would probably install Ubuntu (Linux) just to "clear off" the system, and then go back and cover up Linux with whatever Windows you want.

 

[Kirby King]

Don't install a new OS.

First, try memtest86+: http://www.memtest.org/
It'll run some tests on your memory to make sure all's up to snuff. Memory issues can cause all sorts of weird problems, and if your RAM is bad it's easy enough to detect. So try that first.

If that doesn't work, you may want to try a LiveCD or something to see if your system is reasonably stable running off of a disc. There are other options too, but doing anything that might endanger what's on your hard drive any more so than it's already been is unnecessary.

 

[BentoBox]

Turns out the problem resided in the XP I downloaded, which had issues with SATA HDs~ I contacted my comp's manufacturer and they sent me a legit XP and the installation was successful~

But as I did not want to lose all my files, I simply overwrote the previous windows folder. Now, I have 4 different my documents folders. My Program Files folder still contains all the programs I had before the installation, except that none of said programs actually feature in the Control Panel's Add/Remove Tool~ And as a result, some of the programs work while some others I have to re-install... Browsing the internet feels a lot more sluggish too. Never before did this happen after installing windows.

I ran the registry cleaner and it found 300+ problems... I think I'd like to reformat the entire disk, but I really don't feel like burning 150GB of data on DVDs so I was wondering if it was possible to partition my HD in 2, to store all my files on one partition (music, vids, excel/word/pdf docs, etc) and format and re-install windows on the main partition? (and possibly get rid of the second partition once everything is done)

 

[Kirby King]

There's no good way to split a partition in XP. (There are ways, but AFAIK they cost money.)

 

[BentoBox]

So my only viable option is to burn everything I wish to keep?

 

[Kirby King]

Well, move it somewhere else. You could put it on an external hard drive, a second internal hard drive, a networked computer, ~100,000 floppies....

Although actually, there is ntfsresize, which you could probably make use of via a Live CD. So you would need to burn that, but you would also need to (a) have enough faith that it won't screw up your data (not that you should assume it will, but you can't guarantee it won't) and (b) have enough space on your drive to handle partitioning it and moving stuff from one partition to the other, i.e. you need at least as much free space as you have data you want to save. (Technically that's not really true, since you can resize partitions a little bit at a time, move files, resize partitions, move files, etc. But probably not what you're looking to do.)

 

[Zolga Owns]

An external harddrive is your best bet for backing up those files.

My bro has this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822324013
And he hasn't had any problems.