Did I hose my system?

[ghost_of_war]

First off, the specs:

Windows XP
(2) nVidia 8800 GT's in SLI
250GB SATA HD
2GB of RAM
Abit Motherboard

System was running fine. I decided to create a new partition with Partition Magic in preparation for Windows 7 to dual boot. After PM wanted to reboot, my system froze during the 'reconstruction' phase I'd guess you'd call it. Now, when I reboot, I get a quick BSOD and then it takes me to the Advanced Options Menu. I cannot make any selections there as the keyboard doesn't work. I tried a PS/2 keyboard and same thing. I tried changing the BIOS to boot from CD and of course it says PRESS ANY KEY TO BOOT FROM CD, which I cannot do. The whole process constantly repeats itself (endless reboot).

I was hoping to at least get into a command prompt and start system restore or maybe a FIXMBR - any help would be appreciated.

[glc]

Follow the procedure for clearing the CMOS - either with a jumper or by removing the battery.

[ghost_of_war]

Alright, removed the CMOS battery and I seem to have gotten more insight as to what is wrong. Instead of doing a reboot loop now, it tells me that a system file may be missing or corrupt:

windows\system32\pci.sys

...or something like that, but I know for a fact it was pci.sys - I couldn't get the same message to duplicate. I still can't use the keyboard to boot from the CD when it asks me too.

I took the CD out and tried again and now the error message reads (displays under options menu):

Windows could not start because of an error in the software.
Please report the following problem as 'load needed DLLs for HAL.

[rwest]

It kinda sounds like PM is wanting to finish the job it started, but can't find the drive/partition/folder or wherever it stopped at.
Are you sure you cleared cmos?
After clearing cmos, are you still using a ps/2 keyboard? Have you tried accessing bios? Just to veriffyi f it's keyboard related. If you get into bios it's probably not the keyboard. Also does your MB have two ps/2 ports? Have you tried the keyboard in the other port? Some board's ps/2 ports support both mouse and keyboard.

Do you have another pc ypu can slave the drive to? Maybe you can delete the unrecognized partiion, and stop the process that way.

[ghost_of_war]

I can get into the BIOS, no matter if I use it with USB or PS/2, so the keyboard is good.

[glc]

I think you have some flaky hardware there - ram, power supply, and/or motherboard. Strip it down to bare essentials.

[ghost_of_war]

Just enabled keyboard in BIOS and it worked. I forgot I had reset BIOS settings earlier before doing the CMOS. Nonetheless, I am back in business after running Repair from the CD.....