brief blue screen upon startup

i recently tried booting my sager np2090, and it gets in a cyclic failure to boot.

it goes to the screen asking if id like to boot normally or safe,w/network prompt and all that. And any which way i do it, after no more then a second a brief blue screen comes up, with text, but so fast i can't read any of it, and then my pc shuts down and starts up again, but with the same problems.

whenever i do a safe mode boot it wills scroll the text and stop at a "wdfldr.sys" and the blue screen shows up and my pc automatically shuts down, (idk if that's indicative of something or not)

 

just tried booting from my XP disc that came with it, and it says no harddrive i detected, though in the BIOS i can clearly see that it is and that whatever missing system files are on my harddrive is the cause of this mess

 

That bit of code is the _Windows Driver Foundation loader, which basically deals with versioning of user-mode and kernel-mode drivers in _Vista and, if installed, in XP. Microsoft has a whitepaper that discusses WDF entitled Versioning in the Windows Driver Foundation. The table at the end of that paper contains references to more resources regarding WDF, just in case you're really bored, or really interested.

According to the paper, wdfldr.sys is the code that "loads the driver framework library." It's possible that one or more of the drivers you have, quite possibly the hard drive driver, since that's what you seem to be having trouble with, wasn't properly built against the correct version of wdfldr.sys because, as the "best practices" part of the paper states, it is considered a best practice for a vendor to "[e]nsure that you build the driver against the same version of the framework as the co installer that you supply on the installation media."

I would check for updates on your drivers, in particular the hard drive drivers. If that doesn't help, then try completely uninstalling the hard drive driver, and then reinstalling it.

 

i have the driver disc that came with the product, but how could i reach the drivers without beiing able to access anything but the BIOS?

 

In that case, I'd call up whomever you purchased the system from and tell them that the disk is malfunctioning and you'd like a replacement. Otherwise, you should be able to download the whole suite of drivers from the manufacturer's website, burn them onto a bootable CD/DVD, and work them in that way.

 

Did they give you a full retail XP disc or just an OEM recovery disk? If it's the retail XP disc it doesn't have the appropriate SATA support loaded into the Windows installer. This is why it wouldn't read your hard drive.

To use a SATA drive with a Windowx XP install disc you must either go into the BIOS and switch it to 'Compatibility mode' as appose to 'SATA' or if that options on available, slipstream the appropriate SATA driver with a program called nLite.

This is assuming that it isn't a manufacturer-made recovery disc, as that would likely have had the SATA driver added already by the manufacturer. The other driver disc you talked about is likely only intended to be used after installing Windows.

The appropriate SATA driver can be downloaded from the manufacturer of your chipset (Intel I believe). Just google your chipset and in the first page will be Intel's site. Click 'support' and download the mass storage F6 file.