xp reload cd not working

[themanwhowas]

hi guys. ive screwed my computer for the 7th time in 6 months according to my reload cd. good going. but alas. now it will not reload. xp came pre installed on my pc thats why i have a reload cd instead of a real xp disc. what i did was install fedora linux on a seperate partition and used grub boot loader to choose which os to boot. windows refused to boot from this however so i inserted the xp reload cd and chose to repair boot sectors. i thought that this would just make my pc boot to windows. it did not. now i get a blank screen after the bios has finished. i have tried to use my reload cd to re install windows but it gets to 2 percent and says invalid header code. i have no idea what this means. i have used my partition magic discs to look at my windows partition which now has no label so i assume that it has been formatted. when i look at the partition info i get like 50 errors without the option to fix. i was going to format the hard drive but i wanted some advice first as to whether this will screw my chances of using the reload cd. i do have norton ghost backups on dvd but ghost wont read off my dvds. if i was to format my hard drive and install linux then put the ghost images on to the hard drive then restore the images from there will it restore windows too? if anyone has any suggestions at all i would be most grateful. ps. i apologise for any punctuation errors. i am writing this on my mobile phone. god bless windows mobile :-P

[SuperSparks]

Formatting the disk shouldn't affect the ability to use the reload CD in any way, and that is what I would do at this point.

As to the Ghost image question, I think the only thing to do is try it, it might work OK. You've always got the reload CD to fall back on if it doesn't.

[HaroldW]

If you have valuble data on the drive, I would suggest you try to access it from a Knoppix boot CD and/or a Ultimate Boot CD for Windows CD. If you are not trying to recover data I would go to your drive manufacturers website, download and use their "Zero Disk" utility (usually included as part of their diagnostics CD.) After that completes then try to reload Windows.

[themanwhowas]

i have used the ghost images to restore windows. after formatting my hard drive my reload cd refused to work. i assume that by formatting i deleted some kind of watermark which stops me from using my reload cd on multiple computers. formatting was a nightmare itself. thought my hard drive had died. i had to create an ntfs partition on the second half of my hard drive then convert to fat32 then resize to cover the first half. wouldnt work any other way. but now the computers fine. ghost did the trick.