Hello , I have a major problem with my laptop and would be gratefull for any help on this matter.. I've owned it for 6 months and it's been working fine untill yesterday while installing some software and the screen froze , so I turned it off manually. When I switched it back on it said "Hard Disk Boot Sector Is Invalid".. The operating System is windows XP Home Edition and it's specs are CPU-AMD 1800 athlon , with 384 MB SDRAM. I haven't got any recovery disks so I looked on the internet for advice.. One posting said to create a "first partition" on my hard disk using FDISK Command which I have done and now when I boot it up , It says my operating system is missing.. Was this a fatal mistake ?.. I do have access to another computer at home which runs Windows ME.. I would be gratefull for any advice.

Hi there sounds like you need to reformat and do a clean install it is either a big bug that ereased tour hdd or a verry mean virus just what software were you installing...?? make sure you scan your drive for virus before reinstalling.. N

The software I tried to install was Vilma Oberon for editing the registry.. It didn't seem to install correctly and the computer froze while doing an un-installation.. I wouldn't be too upset with reformatting the hard drive as long as the computer works again. For the price it costs for the recovery disk I might as well buy a new copy of Windows XP which was already pre-installed. At the moment the only option I get when switching the computer on , is to access the system configuration utility but Im not sure where to go from there..

I'm a little unclear as to the circumstances leading to putting a new partition on the drive. In order to do this, the original one had to have been deleted. Did you do this in order to follow the advice you got on the internet? If so then this was bad advice. If the partition was missing anyway, then there's serious trouble with your harddisk, perhaps physical damage. The way to go is to definitley get an XP CD. It's pretty bad that you didn't one with the PC, shouldn't have to be shelling out for it now. Anyway, if you have got the CD now and have indeed removed the partition from the hard disk then simply re-install and hopefully your disk isn't damaged. For future reference, the boot sector problem should be eaisly repaired as long as it's not physically damaged. Just boot from the XP CD and run the repair option from the setup menu. This will restore your XP installation whilst retaining your settings.