XP will not boot

[Guest]

What happens? it boots up and when it gets to the point where the welcome
screen should appear, the screen stays grey. It will not boot into the
welcome screen. I don't think the hard drive is defective just the partition
table is damaged.
When I boot with the XP startup disk it goes to A:/> when I type in E:/> is
says
there is no such drive, the same with drive D: I have tried changing the
BIOS but the CD Drive is in brackets meaning it is disabled. I don't know
how to change the default from disabled to enabled. I turn on the computer
and it starts to boot up to windows XP and then stalls just before the
welcome screen. It's confusing the H....
out of me. I realize I should just boot from the CD ROM or even the XP
system recovery disk but can't. Fortunately I have no files or folders on
the hard drive to worry about as I regulary back them up to my CD ROM on
CDRWs.
I would prefer to fix the problem but if not able to will consider a new
hard drive.
The computer is only one year old, an 80gb hard drive. Thanks for everyones
help.
Canadianguy

 

[Peter Foldes]

Gary

Did you by any chance use a Registry Cleaner lately. Just curious.

 

[Dee]

Hi there...
When you are in the BIOS, can you try to automatically detect your cd
drives to see if this will enable for you to boot from disk?
You usually tab down to the drive and hit enter - make your selections.
Take Care...
Dee