Friday I stick a cd into my girlfriend's pc, only windows sin't registering it. Looks like the drive's had it, so I open it up and plug in an old one of mine. Again nothing there, so I give up, put it all back together, oh yeah I reset the cmos so it has to check everything. Now windows won't boot up. I tried going onto the repair console from the xp cd (yeah cd drive suddenly works now!) and did the "fixboot" and "fixmbr" that worked last time but no joy. I've tried reinstalling, then with a quick format, then with a full format but I get the same message every time I boot it "Error loading operating system"

My choices here are boot from cd (and install windows to the point where it has to reboot) or get that error message.

Any ideas as she's really annoyed with me every time I touch it I break it!

something similar happened to my laptop once, i had to get a new harddrive cause there was some virus on it. i couldnt reinstal xp or anything.

Hmmm... even after a full on taking a long time format?

Should have mentioned how much space does xp take? Cos it looks like (after the initial failed part-install) that it's taken about 30meg...

I shall look for a new drive...

have you mase sure the cd drive has its jumper on slave setting and the hdd has its jumper on master setting?

Resetting the BIOS probably changed the drive order which confused the XP boot.ini file which stores the partition locations.

Sounds like you have a hidden/corrupt partition table. So I would use a tool I've had for years called "Part Ed" to wipe all partitions regardless.

You could use FDISK from a DOS/Win98 boot disk but it can't always remove unknown partitons. FDISK /mbr might be enough the reset the HDD boot sector.

Are the two drives sharing a cable ? ---> check jumper settings.

Resetting the bios also probably makes the CD the default boot media.... Might be worth playing around with that to get it to boot of the hard disk....

The cd was always the default I think, and I haven't changed any physical settings (master-slave etc) and the hard disk and cd don't even share a cable.

It's really beginning to sound like new drive time the fixboot and fixmbr doesn't work anymore

Is it a SATA hard drive? If so, the setting for compatibility might of changed from AHCI (or something like that) to PATA compatibility, XP can't handle that change.

Some drives just won't share a cable no matter what you do with jumpers, move one drive on to the second controller. socket.