Where to start, where to start…OK, here we go:
On Friday I installed a new HD, a Seagate 250 GB IDE, and used Seagate’s DiscWizard program to copy the entire contents onto the new drive so that it can completly replace the old one. It finished sometime late Friday, but I was away for the weekend, but came back to it sitting idle and just fine on Sunday. I read the instruction thingy on the screen and did as it said (turn off PC, remove drives, change jumper settings so the new drive is master and old is slave, and replace onto the IDE cable in the correct positions (new drive at master spot, etc.)
I booted and all seemed well. But I noticed that my C: drive, the one I booted from, was still my OLD drive, despite it being the slave drive. 
The new drive was the I: drive, I figured “Oh, maybe I actually booted from the I: drive.”
Well, I decidd not to worry about it then. All was well until today. I came home from work at lunch to find my PC had restarted. I logged in and the little box came up asking to send a report to MS. I declined, and went about my business. About twenty minutes later, Blue Screen of Death and another reboot. I loged back in, and no more problems. I get back from work 4 hours later, and still fine. I play a media file, and about halfway through, another BSOD (I also had the second BSOD while playing a media file at lunch (I say that was #2 since #1 happened in the morning when I wan’t here.)) The error said something about display drivers, so I DL new ones from nvidia and imstall. Install goes fine. I didn’t restart just then, big mistake. After ~1 minute, another BSOD. Since it was not an official Windows restart, I know the driver change might not have gone through. After a restart, I cannot stay on. I try to reinstall drivers, and even got it to do so once and restarted from the program, but no luck. I got a couple more BSODs after five to ten minutes, then it couldn’t even stay on for a minute, then I couldn’t even log in, and it even had a BSOD at the XP splash screen.
I wsas able to get into safe mode w/ networking. I did a system restore to Monday night (I should have gone back before the new HD I think, since that is the only change between last week and now.) It said it restored just fine and restarted. I logged in fine into normal mode, but my display was all fucked up. I was in 4-bit mode ( :eek: ) and lowest resolution. I went to settings, but couldn’t change it. There were no other options to change to for resolution or color depth. I try to go to nvidia’s site to DL the drivers again (since I did a restore, the install file was gone.) But both IE and Firefox keep crashing before I can DL it. I never got a blue screen, but clearly I cannot let it stay like this. I think maybe the drives might be goofing up. I unplug the old one (which was in slave position) and just keep the new one in master. I try to start…but I get a BIOS message to insert a system disc.
The HELL? It IS a system disc. I used the disc wizard, which was MEANT to copy everything to a new drive so I CAN use that drive to replace the old one as a new boot drive. DAMMIT.
I haven’t done anything more. FTR, my bluescreen messages were all over the place. Some said to check video drivers (hence why I went to nvidia’s site,) others said to check memory, som said check BIOS, and one said check hard drives (in fact, after the BSOD during boot, WIndows did some kind of automatic disc checker, and it said the boot drive was fine.)
So, what to do what to do? My next plan is to put the drive back in their old positions (old drive as master, new drive as slave) boot in safe mode, use system restore to go back to thursday night before the disc copy, get new vid drivers and install in safe mode, reb oot, and see what that gives me. If I can, I’ll also download memchecker and make sure my RAM is fine.