I had an unmountable boot volume so i ran recovery from the recovery disk. I ran fixboot then tried to reboot, the bios sees the hard drive but now will not boot. I switched the BIOS to boot from a floppy and it won't. I tried another hard drive with another OS and it booted just fine. I put the xp home disk back in the pc and it won't boot. I set the xp home disk to slave, put the good disk in as master and it won't boot. I go through the boot but it hangs after it detects the two disks and my cd-rom. Help please!

Hello Ryan, Have you already tried to boot in safe mode and do a system restore or boot to last known good configuration? If so you may have to do a repair install. Boot to the CD like you're going to the recovery console. Go past the recovery console and say you want to install XP. You will be given another repair option, choose yes and windows will re-load repairing any lost or corrupted files. You will loose everything in "my documents". You will also loose any old emails if you use outlook express. All your other applications will be left intact. You will also have to go to the Windows update site and scan for updates again. Regards

thanks for the quick response smokey. my problem is I can't even boot of a cd-rom or floppy drive. I try to boot up and i hang after it detects the hard disk and the cd-rom drive. (basically goes through the ide's) In the ide check it sees my master hard disk, and my cd-rom, but then it just hangs. I put in a the cd-rom, and go to bios to boot from cd-rom, it justy hangs after it detects my hard drive and cd-rom, i change bios to boot from floppy and i still get the same thing. I power up, checks memory etc. and the ide cables then hangs. It won't boot from floppy or cd-rom. I put a good hard disk with a different OS in and it works fine so it is not the cables or bios setting. Is it a bad hard disk?

Ryan, At this point your guess is as good as mine. When you boot the system can you hear the HD spinning? Can you try that HD in another computer? If you tried to put that hard drive thats in question in as a slave and the good HD as a master and it wouldn't boot, I would guess that HD was bad but if been wrong before. Its weird that the HD in question would keep the good HD from booting.