Windows XP Home boot up issues - help!!

[liquidblue69mce]

I have been troubleshooting a PC issue and now I’m stuck… Here is how it all started I booted up the PC and I got an prompt something like cannot find boot device I got into the repair functions in the windows XP CD and I did check disk, check config, and the config boot functions. In the process I added a new operating system (I’ll explain in a bit) and I eventually was able to get back into windows. Here is the kicker; I did not back up the data as soon I got into windows and then prepared to reload windows. Like a idiot, I restarted the PC and a new prompt appeared select the operating system to use the options were the one I accidentally added (yeah from above) c: & microsoft windows XP home edition were my two options to choose. I clicked on the c: and the PC just restarted, this makes sense because I did dummy entries when setting this up in the confgboot part of the repair function on the CD. When I clicked the microsoft windows I get another new prompt, could not start because of a computer disk harddrive config problem. It goes on to read, could not read from the selected boot disk. Check bootpath & disk hardware. I went into BIOS and I was not able to order the boot list to have the HD in the 1st position. It was like the HD wasn’t there. I’m afraid that I messed things up more with the confgboot program and that windows is getting confused some how. Is there some way to set the boot system to default (I think there is, I think I used it, and nothing was fixed). Can someone also explain what the various functions that the repair disk does in laymen’s terms? I’ll get onto the PC to see what other damage…I mean what other steps I can take… Will update tomorrow…

-Hector

[glc]

Your best bet may be to slave the drive into another computer or put it in an external housing to recover the data - then wipe the drive and start over. The parallel install you did is really a last resort and makes a real mess of things, it's designed strictly to allow you to recover data, and if you did not do it correctly, you may have wiped out everything in Documents and Settings anyway.