My apologies for posting in more than one topic, but my question sort of jumps the fence.

Have a machine running XP that wont boot. It gets stuck just after the HD and Cd drive tests, then freezes. Burned a boot cd with Winternal ERD Commander, but it doesn't run. Should I boot he drive from DOS, and if so how can I get into it? Can I access it from BIOS?
BTW I can get into BIOS Setup, but not safe mode or recovery. (HP Pavillion about 15 mos old)
Thanks for any input
RustyDOS from bios... nope.

Do you have an xp disk?

Just remember, any disk you want to boot from, be it a floppy or a cd, needs to be inserted into the appropriate drive and that drive needs to be set as the 1ST boot device in your bios.

In your case you will NEED to enter bios & set your cdwhatever as the 1st boot device, save the changes & let it boot with the cd in the drive.Have tried it without sucess.

Do I need to change the primary/seondary master in the main BIOS screen, or do I just change the boot order on the boot screen, by moving the CD Rom above all else?What are you trying to do? .........do you mean acccessing the cmd prompt.........on boot ......hold down the f8 key......tell more...../?Trying to get my CD Rom to boot system. Cant get anything to start except BIOS at F1, can't F8 for safemode, can't F10 for recovery.. Was trying to boot from boot disk and winternal, but drive light comes on at start up, then nothing. Sticks on HP press F1 screen.

Will post more later, when I'm home from work.
BTW HP sending recovery disk, but I'm not convinced that wil work, since I can't seem to boot anything from cd.
Ps tried moving jumpers on cd drive, no go. Where should the JUMPER be to get this to work.
Thank for any help
Rusty