i got another piece of crap today , a compaq presario with a 40 gig maxtor and who knows what else . it gives the NTLDR message and i went screwing around in the recovery and i think i made it worse . i slaved the hd and there is nothing on the drive . in repair if i use ENABLE it says "system registry does not appear to have an active controll set key, the system registry may be damaged" . if i use windows set up it says my xp disc is not a windows cd and sometimes it says to install 98' or 2000 . i think one time i used another xp disc and then put the original xp back in and after it read the files when i had this problem with another pc. but i cant find my other disc of course . i have no clue what to do .

i think what my question is , is there a way to "reset" the things the changes in the repair console to make it where i can load a o.s. ?

ur saying there's nothing on the hd, so what do u / did u want to repair?

these error messages :
"my xp disc is not a windows cd and sometimes it says to install 98' or 2000"

what's the original message?

when you have the option to set up windows or repair , going to set up windows ,press f8 to accept agreement garbage and then " setup cannot find a previous version of windows installed on your computer .to continue , setup needs to verify that you qualify to use this upgrade product.

please insert windows nt 3.51 workstation , windows 2000 pro , win 95 , win 98 or windows millenium "
i put my xp cd in and it says
"set up cannot read or cd is not a valid windows cd." and the previous message as well .
there is nothing wrong with the disc . Do i need to back track with an older O.S. version or before i can "upgrade" to xp ?

Hi,
Providing you have a legit xp cd and not a copy, then this is what kept happening to me last year, I was trying to do an xp repair and was getting the same as you. I found that the reason at that time was...I had updated with sp2 and it thought my disc was a lower version of xp. I ended up doing a clean install.

do you know what operating system was originally installed on that hard disk?

the original o.s. was xp home .
the way i fixed this problem is weird .
when i was prompted to "please insert windows nt 3.51 workstation , windows 2000 pro , win 95 , win 98 or windows millenium " i put in a xp profesional disc and then i was allowed to choose which drive to install the xp , then i got a message to put xp home back in the cd drive and xp installed perfectly .what is the logic in this ? i never have all these problems on my mac , it makes me feel like microsoft dosnt really give a crap.

Have you tried booting from CD to the Recovery Console and running the following commands:

• fixboot
• fixmbr

...that might fix things, unless your boot.ini had been modified. Here's an example, booting from the first partition of the primary drive (master drive) - or the primary partition, of the first drive - however you'd like to word it!


...change WINNT to Windows (your Windows directory, the folder where Windblow$ is installed) & modify the rest of the text accordingly, for Windows XP.