Rod Speed wrote:
wrote:

The screwdriver trick between pins 6 and
8 appears to have booted the machine.

However, when I attach my hard drive and boot, Windows pops up a
blue screen of death immediately. Windows says it detected something
unusual about my machine and is halting the boot to prevent damage to
my PC. Any ideas as to what might cause Windows to say this?

Fraid not, never seen that.

Likely something Dell specific.

It's A windows XP, BSOD. Some of them are now worded that way. But it
usually means there's a hardware issue.

Question 1: Are you hoping and praying you can take a hard drive loaded
with XP, that was built in another computer, and have it work? XP
doesn't like that. You should do a clean install, at a mimimum you will
have to do a repair install.

Question 2: Have you verified the memory with memtest86+ from
www.memtest.org? If it's bad, that sucks, Rambus ain't cheap.