XP problem

[DrCause]

Hi, this is my first computer so I'd like to say, I'm a noob. With that I'll explain the problem. I started up my system once and it asked for an opperating system disk, so I put my windows xp in and pressed enter, I went and got some water and it asked me to press enter again. For some reason my keyboard didn't work so I tried unpluging it and all that. After no success I just restarted my computer. The little logo came up and it did an IDE scan. After that it updated the DMI pool, I didn't know what was going on, but I waited 30 min and when I came back the screen was still the same, and there was no prompt for windows xp. My question is this, What should I do?

Thanks for reading my comment, I hope my terrible noobishness didn't offend anyone.
Oh and help would be appreciated. Thanks again.
I posted this in build you own pc, or whatever, but this is more appropriate I think.

[bailey]

ok
by doing what you did, you installed or attempted to install xp a second time, at least that is the way I read your post.

what you may need to do now is do a repair install of xp, this may work or it may not work.

boot fron the xp cd and start the install as you normally would, at one point it will ask if you want to install in the existing directory, say yes.
then at another point it will ask if you want to do a new install or a repair install, select the repair install.
it should then do the complete repair of xp.
when it gets done, you will need to redo all the updates and service packs you may need.
all your other information and data will still be there.

but first, before you do this, wait for another post to verify what I said is correct, as I have not had to do this for some time and may have missed something.

[DrCause]

any advice is better than none, I'm sure you're on to something. and the help is appreciated. I'm going to try and get a friend to help me out also, I'll show him your post.

[glc]

Sounds more like hardware failure to me.