windows xp- disk boot failure

[Electricice]

My dads computer will not boot into windos xp giving a disk boot error.... anyone know what i should go about doing, if formating is not an option?

 

[amdskip]

Try booting into safe mode by pressing F8 (think thats right) and if you are still getting the boot disk error, it is either a hugely corrupted file system or else the hard drive is dead

 

[orion7144]

Has anything been done to this comp lately. Like changing the HDD to another port? I had that happen to me when I had a raid setup with another drive on IDE1. When I removed the drive on IDE one I got the same error as you. All I had to do was start the install process to a different dir. then on the first boot during the install just select the second option on the boot menu.