Win2K freezing in start-up

[Hickpoppy]

Recently did a clean install of Windows 2000 on my HP Pavilion 8570C which has a PIII 450MHz and 96MB RAM.

After the install, everything seemed to be working great, but I shutdown the computer and went to bed. When I started the computer the next day, the computer locked up on the baby blue start-up screen with an hour glass next to my mouse pointer. I thought it was a fluke and restarted the computer and the same happens.

Any help you can give me is very much appreciated.

Thanks

 

[bruincal]

have you tried booting into Safe Mode? hold down F8 during startup and choose Safe Mode from the menu...
In Safe Mode, you can look through Device Manager and see any potentially conflicting hardware, or change settings for the bootup. You can also disable certain devices in order to test if they are causing the lockup.

 

[Hickpoppy]

Have tried that and I cannot even get to safe mode.

 

[SmirnoffIsTasty]

Remove all the crap PCI cards you don't need, and put them back in one at a time to see if you've got a conflict.