Ok made a big mistake I guess. I put a new hard drive in my working machine and wanted to put xp-hm on it to place in another computer that d drive wasn't working. Things went ok with installing it in the new drive. Removed hard drive now won't load from my c drive. Can it be fixed and how? Thank you all for your help.

I don't know how you had things setup when you did this installation or exactly what may have gone wrong with your primary HDD...I can only guess that you accidentally created a dual boot setup? What comes up on the screen when you try to boot? When you attempt something like that, you should always disconnect the primary HDD so that nothing "bad" happens to it. BTW, temporarily installing a HDD, installing XP on it, then swapping it to another machine usually doesn't work. You'll probably find that it won't boot into Windows because it's configured for the system XP was installed on...all you'll get is a BSOD. The only way to fix it will be to install Windows again, this time in the system the HDD will be used in. You should be able to use the "repair install" method, but you'll need a working CD-ROM drive to do it.

Thank you for your help. What you were saying is what I did I guess with the dual boot. I removed new hard drive. Set it so it would read my cd rom with my xp-hm disk.

Won't read the disk though. What did I do wrong? Thank you for your help

What disk are are you talking about the cd or HDD ? Do you now have the HDD in another box ? If you cant read the CD as a bootup medium then check that the BIOS is set to read the CD drive as the first drive on bootup. As JAM said a repair usually fixes this problem. Good Luck TerryF

run fdisk & format. now says can't run xp setup in dos mode. i'm lost please help. thank you for your help

Put yr Windows CD in the CD drive and restart yr computer. If the BIOS is setup correctly then the systems shud read from the CD. What happens when you do this ? Regards TerryF