Problem is WinXP won’t boot. Here’s the specs:
Dell Inspiron 2200, WinXP Pro Sp2, Celeron M 1.4 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 200 GB HD, BIOS version A03 (03/31/2005)

Norton360 antivirus

I have a bootable WinXP CD.

What happened: Logged onto PC and desktop loaded normally but browser (Firefox) was not opening so I clicked Restart. The boot-up got to the WinXP logo then the screen went dark except for the backlight and there was a dash with a blinking cursor in the upper left corner, LIKE a DOS prompt. The PC tried to boot twice more and then froze at the dark screen. There was no error message. Oddly the num lock status light was on. I tried ESC, Enter, F2, F8, F12, space, typing—nothing changed. I tried restarting and pressing F8 at the Win logo, but that didn’t work.

I put in the WinXP CD and RESTARTED to the Win logo and pressed F12 to get into the start-up. I opened the Recovery Console and did chkdsk /r and chdsk /p and it said some ERRORS were found and fixed but STILL no boot-up. I tried fixboot and fixmbr, still nothing. I checked the boot.ini using  type c:\boot.ini  and it looks ok.

I have checked DOZENS of posts on many different forums about how to fix boot problems on the Inspiron 2200 and have about exhausted my ideas. Can anyone please suggest something else to troubleshoot before I give up and reload the OS? Thanks for reading this.


I'd swap out the HDD which is likely damaged, some damages can not be corrected through chkdsk.