Hi, Ive gone and done a silly thing.. my computer was becoming really slow at booting (upto 4/5mins) so after reading a few answers in here to similar problems, I went into MSCONFIG and selected the BOOT.INI tab and changed the Timeout from 30 seconds to 5 seconds. Thinking that would speed up the process, my computer runs in a continuious cycle of booting to displaying the XP loading screen for a few seconds before rebooting again. I can access the BIOS but not the OS, I cant even boot into safe made or last know configuration without the same thing happening. As far as im aware the only other possible cause for the delay before I changed this time out was due to the fact that I tried to set up a wireless link with my laptop but failed, as it would often be heard trying to access the ZIP drive a few times during booting. I have checked for virus's and spyware and my system was clean. Please let me know if there is any way of getting in to the operating system to change this setting again. Thanks... :)

See if there is anything here that might help: http://www.belchfire.net/~userxp/fixproblems.htm M

Tried that page, didn't seem relevant, but thanks anyway. Ive tried booting with the original xp cd and entered the recovery console, typed FIXBOOT and it stated the file system was NTFS..(correct) it then said the bootsector was corrupted.. it then sucessfully wrote a new boot sector. Upon reboot I chose start windows normally.. and the problem is still present. Exactly 7 seconds into the loading screen it reboots. Chkdsk /r reported that "the volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems" I am clueless as to what to do next. The HDD is only a month old which was cloned from my old drive and ive not had any other problems since the install, i even did a virus scan yesterday with Norton and found nothing. Please help!!!

Chkdsk /r reported that "the volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems" That's not good. I suggest that you download a diagnostic from the hard drive manufacturer's web site.

I ran seagate diagnostics from bootable floppy, qiuck test failed and full scan is currently reporting 10+ bad sectors on the drive. Surely altering the timeout would not have caused this? As ive had the drive for less than 30days, am I within my rights to return it to the supplier or manufacturer? Would it be possible to install windows again on the drive in an unused space by creating a partition near the end of the drive that will not have been used, then take it from there to try to recover some of the information on the drive? Follow up greatly appreciated.