Problems reinstalling windows XP

[MontereyJaxx]

So I built a new computer a few months back that never was completely stable. It was crashing a lot lately, so I decided to try a reinstall of XP. Everything went fine, first thing after XP install, tried installing chipset drivers (NForce3). Now XP won't boot. Message is "system32\drivers\nvatabus.sys is missing or corrupt". I've tried repairing a couple of times and the XP setup gets a blue screen on "application failed to initialize".

The computer is useless now. Can't boot, can't be repaired. Can I format the hard drive and try again? How can I do that though since Setup won't get that far?

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[montag451]

can you use a boot dos floppy to fdisk and format in fat32.

but it really does sound like a h/w issue.

 

[jackschmittusa]

Here's a thread where I refferenced Zap63. The site was down temporarily due to traffic, but the program works like a charm for clearing partitions and formats from a hard drive.thread

 

[MontereyJaxx]

The problem turned out to be bad memory. Both sticks.

Thanks for the tips.