Hi I need help, Just about every time I reboot, I loose my partition(s) I have reinstalled XP 5 times now and the longest it would run is 2 days. It's not everytime I reboot either. last night I rebooted 15 times to make sure that it would stay running, installed Office and rebooted, all was fine, installed norton, all was fine, installed power dvd , ( install went fine ) rebooted and left the cd in and For no resaon it wants to boot from the cd-rom drive and I get the message DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER Bio's is set to run floppy drive, hardrive, cdrom. What I have found out it that through the win xp disk with trying to use the repair function is that there is no partition. I also tried a win 98se boot disk to look at fdisk, once again there is no partition. I have tried everything that I know including scanning the hard drive, ( which was fine )What would cause my partition to just delete itself from a simple reboot. XP Pro 875 MHZ p3 512 pc133 40 gb Maxtor slot 1 MoBo

Clear NVRAM and load default setup in the BIOS. You should also set the HDD or CDROM as the first boot device. See if it works.

Clearing the cmos seemed to help, I'm running Maxtor program on the drive tonight, So I'll post back Thursday night to let everyone know if I can get on with my life. Thanks for your help tonight. By the way any idea why the NVRAM would get out of wack? Seems to me that only a Virus would do this?

Same problem, cleared cmos , ran all Maxtor tests on the drive, Low level format, reinstalled XP pro , played on the internet for about an hour, rebooted and the partition was gone. Double checked this with an win 98se boot disk and Xp repair on install cd. Pulled the drive and slaved it, tossed in an old 4.3 gb hard drive, ( whick works fine with windows ME ) and that shows me the drive needs to be partitioned. I'm at a loss.