Whilst my problem bears some similarity to threads on this site (and others), their solutions haven't worked for me. Here's what I have tried and the error that is generated... I replaced the hard drive in my machine (the other one decided to stop without warning), connected it up, switched the machine back on and it seems to start up (in that BIOS recognises the hard drive and that it is the "Master" etc). The first error that appears is: "NTLDR is missing. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart." After a bit of searching I found that a fix might be to insert a bootdisk. Being a new HD this has never had an OS on it, but previously I was dual booting linux and XP, so I put the XP disk in the floppy drive, restarted and it starts to boot from the floppy before coming up with this error: "File \biosinfo.inf could not be loaded. The error code is 4109. Setup cannot continue. Press any key to exit." After bit more searching, a couple of people had had success by putting their XP CDs and booting from there. When I tried this, I get the following message during startup: "Boot record from CD..Not found" (And the same thing happened when I put the Fedora release 3 CD in.) I also found a little tool from somewhere which diagnosed that my "hal.dll file is missing or corrupted." Any thoughts?

Is this the only drive in the system? If so you need to start from scratch with new installs for everything. It almost appears that you expected to just put in a drive and everything would work again. So what am I missing here?

Hi. Yes this is the only drive. I figured I would have to do reinstallations but when I put the CD in to install I get the message: "Boot record from CD..Not found" And it tries to boot from the hard disk, where there is obviously no OS. The CD is recognised at startup, and the CD I'm booting from is OK.