Windows messed up, cannot reformat

[Dudd]

So, a couple days ago my system stopped working. If I booted into Windows, nothing but a black screen would pop up unless I booted into safe mode. Anyways, I didn't really feel like spending the time to figure out why this was happening, and I just decided to reformat. Backed up my data, grabbed an XP cd, and tried to boot from it. All I get when I try this is the following error message.

DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK

I've been googling this for a while, and I haven't found anyone who has had this problem, getting this error with an XP disk in the drive. I've tried installing XP while in safe mode, and it won't let me, telling me that the version of XP I'm trying to install is older than the current one, which makes sense since it's a SP1 version of XP Pro. Any ideas?

[LeapFrog]

Is your CDROM drive before your HD in the boot order? You can set this in the bios. I'm guessing it is as you are getting the message as opposed to booting of the HD... dunno but you can check that.

If you have access to another computer you can create a boot CD then install but you really should be able to boot off of an XP cd.

edit: not to besmirch your honor here, but is an original XP cd, not a copy?

[Dudd]

It's not the XP cd, I've tried multiple ones and they all come up with the same error. I've also set the cd first in the boot order, and that's where the error occurs.

[LeapFrog]

Hmm well if its not boot order or media then I guess the next step is hardware. You could try swapping another CDROM drive in. Have you ever been able to boot from the drive? This is a strange problem you have here...

edit: one thing you could try -- a google search yielded some other people with the same problem. One guys solution was to have the cdrom drive as the only boot device, remove all others. Someone else said they tried this and it didn't work -- shot in the dark, but it wouldn't take long to test.