This happens in a constant loop. I get the packard bell logo, the floppy is detected but as soon as windows is about to load, the pc resets.

I've checked the bios and the date and time is current so I assume the battery is ok.I've checked the connections and bios recognises the existence of all drives.

I've used a boot disk but when trying to access the C or D drive (even the dvd rom and cd rom) I get "invalid drive specification".

I haven't recently installed anything or added new hardware.

I've tried safe mode - same thing happens.

I have a packard bell platinum 800mhz with 1gb sdram running Xp and have updated the bios a few months back.

Any help will be welcomed!

Thanks,

Karl.

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The first thing I would try is to strip back to a minimal boot. You indicate that you are getting POST, so I would strip back to the floppy drive and disconnect the other drives. Try a boot floppy to see if you can get to a DOS prompt. If you can, add a drive and try a boot. If it boots, you add another an so on. If it doesn't boot, it means that either the drive or the drive cable is probably bad. If it is a hard drive, you could run the diagnostic utilities from the hard drive manufacturer, but I would probably try replacing the cable first. If it doesn't work with just the floppy, I would suspect the RAM....