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Mortal
You have a HDD failure, I think the BIOS cannot find the boot sector on the HDD. There is a number of things that you can do.
So how does XP start loading?
It's could be one of a few things. If it restarts constantly at this same point, then it's down to a hard drive bad sector, a corrupt system file or a dodgy driver loaded before you last shutdown/restarted the PC. The last 2 could be caused by a virus, but it's very unlikely.
Before you go any further, you'll want to do a backup. If you can't get into safe mode then your best option is to do a backup through some bootable media or take the hard drive out, stick it in another PC and backup the important data that way - either way you've learned the hard way that you should be doing regular backups.
Once done, there's only 2 things I can think of to actually rectify the problem - neither are likely to fix it, but it's worth a go. If you boot from the XP CD and enter the Recovery Console, you can try 2 commands:
chkdsk /f will scan for file system errors on the hard drive, and sometimes fix them sufficiently. If that doesn't work, go back to the Recovery Console and run
sfc /scannow. That will scan your core system files and if it discovers and corrupt or foreign system file, it will replace it with the version either from the dll store or the XP CD.
When you've got off the data you need, you'll probably be wanting to do a reinstall.
This is where Vista and Win7 come in very handy - from the CD there is an program which will scan for problems preventing startup and try to fix them automatically.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/01/2010 12:03AM by gav.