Need help

It may be a corrupt MBR, or possibly the boot partition. If you have an XP disk, try to get into the recovery console.

1. Restart your computer with the Windows XP Setup disk in the CDROM drive.
2. If you are prompted to press a key to start the computer from CDROM, do so quickly. Otherwise it may try to boot from the hard drive.
3. After a few minutes, you'll see a prompt to press the R key to start the Recovery Console.
4. When Recovery Console starts, it will prompt you to enter a number corresponding to the Windows XP installation that you need to repair. In most cases, you'll enter "1" (which will be the only choice). If you press ENTER without typing a number, Recovery Console will quit and restart your computer.
5. Enter your Administrator password (if you have one) If you don't enter the correct password, you cannot continue.
6. At the Recovery Console command prompt, type fixmbr and then verify that you want to proceed.

If that doesn't work, try the above procedure again, but substitute "fixmbr" with "fixboot". Good luck!

Sounds like a failing hard drive or corrupt file system.

 

Or possibly you have a non bootable disk in the floppy drive, assuming it has one as most laptops dont.

 

Is this Windows XP? If so, try booting from the XP cd. At the menu, choose R for recovery console.

 

In the recovery console, type in CHKDSK /R and let it run, it may take well over and hour to run, if it runs at all. If the recovery console is unable to load, or chkdsk wont run, you may have a failing hard drive.