welcome screen

[Guest]

I have a HP Pavilion 5170 note book. It of course is running Windows
XP. I can not get to the welcome screen to log in. I have had this problem
in the past and have resorted to reinstalling
Windows XP and losing all my files. I think I have determined the root. This
occurs when one of my children leave one of their CDs in the CD/DVD drive.
Apparently the BIOS is set primarily to boot from the CD/DVD drive.

I have looked at my bios and do not believe that I can boot from my disk
drive. The only option I have is to boot from my cd/dvd drive. When try to
boot from disk one (1) of six (6) of my reinstallation/ recovery disk I am
prompted with three choices: continue at the risk of loosing all file in my
hard drive, discontinue process, and diagnostic test. I have tried to type r
at this point and was not able to accomplish anything. I depressed continue
and was able to advance to another screen with additional options. At this
point I have tried once again to type the letter R with no results. Some how
I made it to the "C:" prompt and did not see the C:\windows\system32\
directories. The only directory on the C drive was TEMP. Some where along the
lines I have missed something. Do you have any suggestions?

 

[Uncle John]

Larry,


Could you explain
"I have looked at my bios and do not believe that I can boot from my disk
drive. "
The option must be there. Do you mean that the hard disk will not boot?
If this is the case you need to insert your Windows CD and boot from that
and try a repair install
Look at the instructions for a repair install here:-
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm
If this does not work try doing a clean install and instead of overwriting
the existing installation do a new installation to another folder.
If after booting into "Windows(new)" you can not see the first installation
you will then have to reinstall your applications and you will have lost
your data. However if you can see the old installation "Windows" you will be
able to recover your data to the new installation after reinstalling the
applications.