cannot get to welcome screen - stuck in windows banner screen

[Guest]

i need someone with some experience to get back to the operating system in my
windows xp home edition... (dell inspiron 1000).. ran the diagnostics and
keep coming up with: ide disk s/n nn50t4915ljj read test failed.. error
code:0f000240..when i try to boot to the o/s i only get the banner screen
that keeps scrolling without booting to the welcome screen.. i sure could use
any help possible.. i cannot use my laptop at all.. thanks much for all
help.. ger

 

[Orion]

Sounds to me like you have a corrupted windows file. My only suggestion
would be to run a scandisk/chkdsk with surface test. You will most likely
need a boot disk .. and most likely it will have to be a bootable cd because
you probably don't have a floppy drive. You can get a Windows 98 boot disk
with scandisk on it through www.bootdisk.com but then you would need to
create a bootable CD with those files on it from another computer.