Stump the Geek - What’s Wrong?

I’m a board member of the Oregon Computer Consultants Association and at each monthly meeting, there’s a few minutes where people ask questions about strange behavior, and get help from their peers.

Well, the meeting was last night (Ben Lee from Intel) , and I had nothing to ask, but TODAY is another matter. The following message just went out to the entire group -

Hi everyone - Here’s my Stump the Geek question…
I rebooted my computer this AM and went snowboarding.

I came home and it said “Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt…” etc. –

So, I hit the arrow key, and got an instant reboot, instead of allowing me to choose “last known config” or Safe Mode, or anything.

It just booted up to where it says, “boot from CD” and sits there.

I put in my Windows CD, booted off it, and attempted a repair installation, but the C:/ Windows installation is not found.

Assuming I had a bad C drive, I disconnected all drives, took the C out, added a brand new C, and partially installed Windows clean –

After one of the reboots at install, now I get this –

Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem.
Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware.
Please check the Windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information.

So I got here to my issue on Microsoft support -

Unfortunately, I cant edit anything like that says, since I can’t even remember any Dos commands (not that I knew many) and figured I’d just try a NEW clean windows install, but…

NOWI can’t even get it to boot again from the CD. it just skips past now matter how many times I actually press any key to boot from CD. It then jumps right to that same message.

My keyboard works fine to go into the bios, and FYI, this is Windows XP on a dual core Intel chip, on an Intel 965 chipset board, 4 gigs of ram

I found someone else having the exact same problem back in 2006, - Partial Windows install, then stuck unable to boot from CD with my same message - but the thread had no resolution –

I’m lucky I have all my data on the F drive, and even backed up too on a USB drive, so I just need @#$%ing Windows and Office installed, AV etc.

At 9am tomorrow, I’m carrying it somewhere, (maybe the side of the Broadway Bridge) unless someone has any ideas for me, ‘cause I’ve had it.