My Computer won't load past the splash screen after XP SP3 Install

[Atrias]

Hey there guys,

Sorry I've not posted anything since my last query... I hope that someone might forgive me and help me out with this one; otherwise I'm really up the creek.

Its been a few weeks now since I started installing XP SP3 on my machines. It worked fine on my brother's DELL machine and it worked fine on my super old XP machine (Now, sadly, arguably the best machine I own). But after following the usual "please restart" instructions  my main rig now completely refuses to boot past the mobo splash screen and has been reduced to a paper-weight.

I cannot get into the BIOS screen or boot from a CD nor see any error messages; just the splash screen (a snake \ flame pic if you must know). It responds to no button presses nor does it make any particular beeps that would be helpful.

My System Specs follow (to the best of my knowledge).

OS - XP (SP3!!)
Motherboard - ECS Elitegroup RS482-M
Graphics- Onboard ATI RADEON XPRESS 200

And other than the superficial size of my RAM and HDD I can't remember the details of the individial devices within the system.

Is there anything I can do, except for using it to hold open my door? I'm guessing theres something in the boot.ini or registry that I can change but all my searches thus far have turned up no results and I'm at a loss and don't want to boot it up as a secondary drive without knowing what to look for.

Many thanks for any help,

Dunc

[unholyman]

did you try booting in safe mode ? then uninstalling the sp3 ?

[win_termute]

You can't get past the BIOS POST screen? Wow. Doesnt sound like its an XP problem then. What you can try to do is reset your BIOS settings to factory defaults. Now there is a jumper on the motherboard for this, but if you're not sure exactly which one it is, or it is hard to get to (you might just break something trying to get to it!) then take out the CMOS battery for 20 minutes, with everything unplugged from the tower. Put it back in and try it out, saved many systems that seemed unworkable this way. Dont know what a CMOS battery is? do a search on google images.