A friend is having problems booting to xp and asked me to have a look. Upon startup, the "Sorry for the inconvenience" screen comes up giving options of booting to safe mode, last known good configuration, etc. Regardless of the choice, the computer restarts and comes back to the same screen. This was a computer given to her by someone else and, of course, there is no XP cd. The only XP cd that I have is the one that came from Dell for my specific machine - for re-installation of the XP that's already on my machine. I've googled this to death and it appears to be a common problem, with a ton of different answers. The best seem to be getting to the recovery console, running chkdsk or fixmbr. But, again, no CD. Does anyone know if I can boot with MY Dell specific XP disk (I'll hafta dig it up)? Also, in my Google searches I seem to remember someone saying I might be able to use a Win 98 CD to boot it up and repair. I have one of those, as well (hafta dig it up, as well). Will that work? Any answers or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. She promises me a great dinner if I can fix it for her.

If your Dell CD is the same as hers....XP Home & XP Home you should be able to use it to do a repair install: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/... when it asks for the key, you have to put in your key number from your PC. When you activate it, you use the key from her PC and will probably have to use the phone method to get it activated. Then you will have to download all the critical updates. By the way, what kind of dinner is she offering? LOL Some HELP in posting on Computing.net plus free progs and instructions Cheers

... I can taste pudding already ... with this 7.35 MB XP iso @ least you can bootup to command prompt console ... it works but is limited .... no ntldr on it... etc ... chkdsk works! . . ... Posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties http://img515.imageshack.us/img515/... Grrrr... ....more

Anything she makes will be fine! LOL. I'm more interested in dessert! Mavis, if I just burn that ISO image to a disk, will it be automatically bootable or do I have to do anything special to make it so?

... its a bootable iso image . . ... Posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties http://img515.imageshack.us/img515/... Grrrr... ....more

Thanks. I'll give that a shot.

I burned the iso image to a disk, but it wasn't bootable on any machine. I use Roxio burning software and, after a little research, found out that I can't burn a bootable disk with my version. There are some shareware burning programs out there that I'm gonna try out and see if they work. Mavis, what do you use? I'm getting hungry. LOL.