My first guess would be a video driver conflict.

Cases where I have seen this is where the monitor has changed and the drivers aren't supported.
SP 2 is installed and you're getting driver conflicts.

Instead of booting to safe mode, use the bootlog option. Boot until point of failure. Reboot to safe mode and you should be able to review the bootlog.txt file in Notepad to see what is causing the failure.

ok, so i set up to capture the bootlog. but after booting regularly to black screen, then rebooting to safe mode, the log only showed my safe mode boot.

i did the exact same thing again, and once again, the log only showed the safe mode boot.

i did try going through my device manager and updating all of my drivers for everything. a few of them got updated, but most didn't have any new drivers. my video card was updated. the problem persists though.

so do you get an error message? because it sounds to me that there is no real error at all. maybe your hard drive is fragmented and the blankness is from windows having to find the winlogon.exe file.
unless i misunderstand, but you are saying when you boot windows - you get the 'loading' screen or whatever, it says Windows XP (Home / Pro) with the little loading boxes going, and then before you get to the logon prompt theres a brief blank screen? or after you get the loading screen, the ONLY thing you get is a blank screen?

it is the latter. after the "load" screen, i only get a blank screen. possibly missing the winlogon.exe huh? i'll search the hard drive to see if i've got it in the system files.

if i can't find it, i'm sure i can find a copy somewhere (unless someone WANTS to give me a link), or should i just reinstall windows? i REALLY don't want to loose all my data, and it would be a HUGE hassle to copy everything.

-thanks for everything!

boot to the recovery console off the windows xp cd.
if you dont know how: insert the disk, "Press any key to boot blah blah blah...", after everything loads, you have the option of the recovery console, install windows, and something else i've never read. tap 'r' for the recovery console, it'll look for all installations of windows, it should prompt you for which install you want to access. usually it'll have something to the effect of: 1. C:\WINDOWS>
you type: 1 <enter>
it may ask for an administrator password.. if you have one, type it. if not, just hit enter. once you get to the prompt, do xp's version of scandisk 🙂

chkdsk /r

the /r tells it to repair whatever error's it finds. hopefully this works for ya 🙂

You said you added memory to your PC. What type of memory did you add. If you added DDR (RAMBUS RAM) know that they work in pairs, also how many memory slots do you have? If you have four slots of memory and filled only two of them make sure the other two are not left empty.

DDR is not RAMBUS RAM. RAMBUS isn't really supported anymore. I only know a handful of people who still have it.

I would check to make sure the RAM is compatible. It is a good idea to use the same type of RAM. For example, if your PC origionally came with PC3200 then the RAM you put in should be PC3200. But you should also ensure the latency is the same for all sticks.

before i run recovery, i just thought i'd let you all know that i did EXTENSIVE research on the ram, contacted DELL, and installed exactly what i needed. matched the mobo and everything.

i'm off to run recovery now, thanks so much everyone, and i'll let you know how it goes in a bit!

-steven

one last thing, should i be worried about installing sp0 over sp2? i'm not certain, but i think the xp pro i have is sp0. it might be sp1. but i KNOW it's not sp2. and i have upgraded to sp2 in the meantime.

I had a persitant problem with that once before. I would boot up and poof just a black screen.

I found out it was a bad SATA drive, the controller went bad on it, so I removed it and the computer ran normally.

I sent the drive back to WD and they sen't me a refurbished one, which I promptly threw into an old PC, because I WONT put refurbished parts in my good computers.
Shame on WD. So now I use Seagate, will never use WD again because the sent me a refurb drive and refused to send me a new one. I had one seagate go bad on me, and I asked them for a new drive that was not a refurb and the lady on the phone said "Sure, no problem!." Now that's service! 😈

"before i run recovery" are you talking about that having < SP2 files? because the files it checks and replaces are not related to a service pack. so then no, you wouldn't have to worry about installing whatever you have over SP2.

that was precisely what i was referring to. but i spoke with my brother and he said basically what you just said so i went with it.

everything is worked out now, i must have had a missing file of some sort, but all is well.

thanks to everyone for helping me out. i'm excited about having found this forum. i'm sure you'll see me popping up now and again

-steven

awesome, glad its working 🙂

yea, take your coat off, stay a while ^_^ this forum is a great resource.