hi i have a 18 month old pc pentium 4,sata drive etc,xp home, it decided not to boot have tried all the modes safe etc,the dvd cd has not been used much but is not reading the os system cd rom i have checked the cables etc it starts and lights up but will not read, i want to use it to boot or reinstall xp over or a clean install, i have done this several times on other peoples pc,s so this is no problem, could any one please help, thanks

thanks for your quick responce, i should have said i have changed the boot order to cd first, this pc was completely blank and i could not use the f keys until i powered down and removed the motherboard jumper, this enabled me to use the f1 key etc then reset the cmos, then f10 to ok, this is how i got as far as the boot menu [safe mode etc], but then it goes the microsoft emblem page and back to the boot menu, i suspect my daughter in law pulled the plug as she caught my 12 year old grandson on a bad site, it may even be a virus from porn, the pc belongs to my son and family, she is thinking about taking both pc and son to the tip as she is disgusted, if i can boot it i will have no problem to reinstall over the top of the old os then i can search for folders that they are panicking about, thanks, alan.

The OEM installation cd for Windows xp has a repair function in it ... your only recourse may be to boot to the cd and repair your existing installation.

hi thanks, i have now found that if i disconnected the hard drive with the os system disc in the cd drive, restarted it will start to reinstall windows, silly as it sounds connect the hard drive live it will run for about one hour loading the files etc i asked it to create a new partition it done that and formated it then asked me to remove set up cd from the dvd cd drive so it could reboot, guess what it shut down and the screen turned blue no restart, i guess this means a dead hard drive or a mother board fault, i have checked cables etc, if it is the mother board would it start to load the files, i cannot afford a board so i may risk a new sata drive because if i am wrong i could use it to store software photos etc,in a external case, does this all sound right or does any one think it could be some thing diferent, thanks again alan

If you can test your ram .... I would suggest doing that before changing the mother board or getting a new hard drive

It sounds to me that you have a file in your C:-WINDOWS-system32 folder that has been the culprit. No matter how or what you clean out of your registry, a file.dll in your C:WINDOWSsystem32 could be rewriting a run command in your HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE-SOFTWARE-Microsoft-Windows-CurrentVersion-Run folder hence rewriting the virus over and over again.

Can you boot into DOS? You could get into the DEBUG mode and run a script to wipe your HDD and your CMOS clean, then reinstall Windows XP®.

For some reason, this site removed all the back slashes "\" so I replaced them with hyphens "-"

Good luck.

J.R.

Try your boot sequence first, and if not, if your computer can boot to dos try using the format command to wipe it first, then clean you CD drive and CD, then try installing XP again. The command for DOS formatting is FORMAT X: where X is your primary hard disk.

You mentioned it was an SATA hard drive. Have you tried installing XP from the CD before? By default, Windows XP doesn't support drivers for an SATA hard drive. 2 things you can try: 1) Go into the motherboard bios at startup by pressing F1 or F2, and see if you can change the SATA input to IDE, then try reinstalling from the CD. 2) Go to the manufacturer's website and download your hard driver's drivers, and copy them to a flash drive. When you enter XP setup, press F6 to insert the drivers into the installation from the flash drive. Hope this helps.