Computer will not boot

[socno24]

The specs are as follows:
AMD 3700+
ASRock motherboard
2 SATA I hard drives in RAID 1
1 GB RAM
6600GT video card
DVD Burner
XP Home

The only change that I have made within the past month is a week or so ago I removed a spare 80gb hard drive from the system. It was on its own IDE channel and I went into BIOS and completely closed down the channel. The system worked fine for several days after I did that, however yesterday it started acting up.

I can access BIOS and it POSTs fine however it will not fully boot up. It gets stuck on a Windows screen that is light blue with a dark blue boarder on both the top and bottom. In the middle is the Windows logo and it says "Windows is starting up..." It never gets past this screen.

I first had the issue yesterday morning, however I kept hitting the reset button until it gave me the option to revert to the last known good configuration. That worked fine all day yesterday (I never rebooted again).

This morning it gets stuck in the same locaation, but I have not yet had the option to go to the last restore point. I do not even see a way to boot into safe mode at the moment.

Short of reinstalling Windows, what are my options? I would like to avoid reinstalling because getting the SATA drivers to be recognized was challenging.

One last change that has been made: The system generally has dual monitors however I disconnected one of them to use with the computer that I am currently using. I highly doubt that this has any effect on the issue.

 

[btcomm1]

Well, while booting keep pushing f8 repeatedly until you get a screen that should give you the option to boot into safe mode. Once you get into safe mode you could disable startup items or try a restore point. If that doesn't work you could try booting off the cd, and try to repair the system from the recovery console. You could try the fixboot command and see if that fixes it, if that doesn't work you could try fixmbr command in the recovery console. You could also try the chkdsk /r in the recovery console. If none of that works you could try to do a repair install of windows.