Thank you for reading, I know it's long but i did not want to leave out any details. After unsuccessfully tried to make a ghost of my main hard drive with Norton ghost 2003, the software leaved a partition to boot the computer. But, i was able to get back to booting win XP instead. To get rid of that unwanted partition that was made using space on my C: drive, i ran my original XP installation cd as if i wanted to do a new install. When it was time to choose a partition to install windows, i went to the unwanted partiton that was 8 Mb total and simply ask windows to delete that partition. Of course, after rebooting, the following message appear: "Disk Boot Failure, insert system disk and press enter" This what i tried to resolve that: I enter the Recovery console in XP and copy the files NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM from the \i386 directory of the XP cd. I ran FIXBOOT C: and FIXMBR Also, i tried to repair the installation of Windows by choosing so when XP install found my previous installation (this is different from recovery console) After all that, still, the same error message. Any inputs ???? Thank you for your time.

maybe format the c: and reinstall? Or if that is what you'd prefer to avoid, try making a bootdisk on another XP computer and use that disk to attempt to boot (note: floppy disk or CD (depences on which you use) must be before the HDD in the boot order). Gender doesn't matter in the Computing world. Commom sence does. Don't forget that.

You may have altered the partition placement on your harddrive and now the boot.ini file is directing the boot to the wrong partition. Check the boot.ini file and make sure the boot is being directed at the proper partition. I made this mistake a while back... I deleted a partition that was located before my windows partition. As a result, the windows partition, which used to be partition 2, then became partition 1. Meanwhile my boot.ini file still said PARTITION 2.... the boot was still being directed to 2 when there was no longer a 2.

If boot.ini you can run recovery consoles bootcfg utility. Otherwise.. You should be able to do a repair install. This is just like a new install [not RC repair] but when given the choice of new or repair choose repair. This will correct registry drive pointers and your booting. You will have to redo your service packs but your apps/data remain intact. Give a person a fish, they eat for a day. Suggest they internet search and they learn a skill for a lifetime.

Blackbill, you know what, it makes a lot of sense. I will try to replace my boot.ini and get back to all of you. Thank you everyone.

It didn't worked !!! In the recovery Console the installation of Windows found is c:\Windows so t seems that the C: drive contains the correct information. Here's the content of my boot.ini file: [boot loader] timeout=1 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect I also tried to edit the boot.ini by changing the partition (1) to (2) but it didn't worked. thanks anyway.

For those who are still reading...... I found a way. There is a little FREE program called TestDisk that was able to determine that my partition was no longer bootable and made it bootable. After that, i just changed again the content of my boot.ini and voilà !!! XP was able to start again. Have a nice day !!!