There is no need to do anything so drastic. If you have a regular, not a 'restore' XP CD, Set the BIOS to boot CD before Hard Disk. Boot the XP CD and, instead of Setup, take the immediate R for Repair. Assume any password requested is blank, and TAB over. Give the command BootCfg /Rebuild Or you can go to Control Panel - System - Advanced, click Settings in Startup and Error recovery and there click Edit to load the file into Notepad for editing. If it looks weird, clear out all its contents and start over - it should look like [boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOW S [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP" /fastdetect With the /fastdetect being at the end of the line starting multi(0) - not wrapped round