Sine yesterday we ar receiving the message "unable to access hard drive", sometimes with "operating system not found on any device". Could we be infected with a virus or does it sound like our hard drive crashed and we need to replace. At this point we are no longer able to boot up. Please help!

Sounds like the master boot record has been corrupted or maybe one or more of the system files. Did you have the system restore option turned on before this happened because you may be able to go back to a previous configeration. Keep tapping F8 when it tries to boot from the active partition and you should get a menu with some options on. Try last known working config or the system restore option. If they don't work you will probably have to re-install XP from teh CD.

You may simply have a corrupt Master Boot Record on the drive. Is the HDD recognised when you do an auto detect for IDE devices in BIOS? If not then suspect a disk problem, if it is recognised then suspect MBR is corrupt. You could try then with FDISK to analyse the Partition information and check if the HDD is set up correctly. A destructive method is to delete any partitions, create a single partition, then reformat the HDD. After that attempt to reinstall Windows. If you are an experienced user, this utility will restore the MBR: http://www.softandco.com/a/3165/Active%20Partition%20Recovery.html

Tried 2 do the destructive means (reformat) wrote the hd 2 zeros as per instructed by Western Digital HD suport Had 2 start over. Went 2 the site you mentioned and that does not support winxp. Just used winxp boot disk (6 Of them_) and began the install. Winxp started transfering files 2 hd from cd, and when asked 2 restart 2 finish cannot see cd or hd niether will boot tried this twice .........