Ok, my problem is long and drawn out. I seriously think that I've become the anti-computer entity. I had numerous problems with my XP system, and borrowed another to back off what I needed to try a clean install. Never could get it to install, would go to the starting windows statement and then black screen. Took it to my local isp to do a thourogh hardware check and they concluded my mobo was frying out. So, back to the one I borrowed ... now, this one is all frucked up. It started in not wanting to boot, gave me the "can't find NTLDR" statement. So, thinking that because I pulled my hd and put it in here trying to setup XP on mine, it attempted to do a dual install, with one OS on one HD and one on the other. I stopped it before it finished, because I didn't want all the drivers and stuff on my HD to reflect this other system. However, it did write to the boot.ini file on the main C drive to do dual boot. I deleted the line so it would just see the 'real' XP on this machine, and it has booted a time or two fine. However, when it won't boot, is when I get the "can't find NTLDR" statement. It gives me this from both the HD boot as well as trying to boot from the XP cd. I went to bootdisk.com and got their single disk xp install/boot one. I can get it to boot up and give me an R drive, which is my cdrom .. however, when I try to change to I386 and run winnt, I get a blue xp setup screen with this message: An internal Setup error has occured. Could not find a place for a swap file. Setup cannot continue, press enter to exit. When I boot with this floppy, I have no access to my c: drive. I'm not familiar with the NT/XP/W2K way of doing things, have always done fat32 or such. Have searched and searched but guess I'm just missing the obvious maybe. Since this is a BORROWED computer, I really need to figure out what the hell is happening and fix it if possible. Thanks for any help, and sorry this is so long.

What good is a 'borrowed' computer ? Return the borrowed, buy a better, newer motherboard, install your own parts, fire up the Windows XP cd and install it on your own computer. Many decent motherboards out there for less than $100.

http://www.ntfaq.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=14717

go to www.pchelplive.com and sign up for a free membership and download there nt boot disk it is specificaly for this problem and has a fix on it as well

LoL

Never had 1 problem with win Xp :P

Well, gee Rawshadow, what a great help you've been. Must be nice to think your time is worth so little that you can waste it posting useless garbage. And, Chris, the borrowed one has 10 gigs of backup on it that I need.

Thank you Michael and Fred, I will look into those fixes.

:D