I have just installed a trial copy of Premier Pro CS3. The install completed without error. I re-booted. Starting PPro took about 10 minutes :(. I then connected my video camera using a USB connection. I've used the camera on this computer before with no problems but, for some reason, the computer claimed the camera was new hardware when I connected it tonight. It failed to find a suitable driver and then, sent my screen to black and tried to re-boot. The re-boots all fail.

I have tried multiple re-boot sequences (including safe mode) with no success. It starts booting, asking about safe mode. I then get the initial Windows logo page but immediately, an error message flashed on the screen (too fast to read) and the computer tries to re-boot again. I did a boot from my original XP CD-ROM and asked for a 'repair'. That failed with an error message about a hard disc configuration error. The error came from NTFS.SYS. It asked my to run CHKDSK but, I can't do that if I can't boot :( My CMOS settings are correct.

My computer is an HP a1320n Multi-media computer with 1GB RAM and a 250GB hard disc. About 12 months ago, I erased the MCE OS and did a clean install of XP with SP2. It has worked smoothly since then, doing audio processing with Sony Soundforge. I do have the disc partitioned to dual boot XP and Linux (the Linux boot option isn't being recognized now either).

Can anyone help me with this? Given that my camera worked fine when I was testing a trial version of Sony Vegas a couple of months ago, and that I haven't changing anything except installing a trial version of PPro CS3 (and Photoshop), I think the problem relates to that installation. But, right now, I just want to recover my ability to boot.

Thanks in advance for any help.

I presume you have tried "Last known good configuration" boot option. It fixed a problm like this nearly all times I tried it. But if you even tried to repair XP installation, I guess that won't help you either. Try to unplug ALL devices from your PC, including disabling onboard peripherals in BIOS.

I don't think this is related to Vegas or your camcorder, because these don't modify any boot files and the camcorder driver is loaded only after you plug it in. It looks like a classic hard drive damage. Unplug your drive, stick it into another computer and check it from there.

Fixed it. I did an extensive goggle search and found quite a lot of discussion about this error, dating back to 2004. The best thread was here (Cannot boot xp. ntfs.sys blue screen 0x00000024 - TechSpot OpenBoards (http://www.techspot.com/vb/showthread.php?t=5352)). Check out page 6, the posting by Grundle, for the clearest explanation of the solution I used. Essentially, it involved booting a CD-ROM version of LINUX (Knoppix) and then running an ntfsfix programme. After that, booting in Windows let the chkdsk programme run and correct about 50 file errors. Things are looking OK (the boot and file access works). I'll check out my camera and PPro later today.

Nick... CS3 can do some odd things, but this is a first. Consequently I tend to doubt that CS3 is the culprit. As Jiri said, your drive is taking the run-of-the-mill dirt nap.

If you don't have another machine to put the drive in, try booting from the OS installation disk or another bootable CD or DVD.

You might want to invest $80 and get a copy of SpinRite from www.grc.com (http://www.grc.com). If your drive is going flaky and it's spewing random data across the drive - causing corruption to the file system - SpinRite will find it, recover the data if at all possible, then mark the bad sectors so they're never used again. SpinRite is written in machine code, so it's about 80k bytes... the best $80 you'll ever spend on disk recovery software! I've heard many stories of SpinRite recovering "dead drives." Sometimes the data has been so important to the user that they've lfet SpinRite running uninterrupted for weeks and when it finished, all the data was recovered! It's good for standard drive maintenance too. As I type this, my computer at home is runing SpinRight on the boot drive to "freshen" the drive and check for any bad sectors. It's going to take about 20 hours on a 250GB drive.

Nice. I haven't heard of SpinRite. Sounds like something to look into.