HELP!!

[starbyfar]

Upon start up, my computer won't read my hard drive. A black screen comes up that says insert boot drive. :

Well I downloaded a bootdrive and i'm on the way home to try it to atleast see if my hard drive can be saved.

Once thats done, I'm not sure where to go from there. I had Win XP on the computer, but I have nothing to reinstall it on my computer. The PC was built for me by a friend and he pirated the copy of XP. Another friend of my has his old copy of Win XP from his last computer. Can I use that for mine, since he know longer uses the same serial number?

What could possibly have caused it to do this? It has a new 30Gig hard drive and the only thing I really download is music. My library has at the most 350 songs, and I find it hard to believe 30G's of space could've been taken up by music. Any suggestions or advice!?!?!

 

[Lewis]

I am going to rule out a bad hard drive sector, because it is new. First check your ribbon and IDE cables in the computer. Now you also could use your friends XP CD and if he or she has not registered it in 3 months you can use the code. But first you have to get into the BIOS by constantly pressing delete as soon as you turn on the computer or F8 if it is a HP computer, and make your CD Rom be the first thing, the computer boots from save settings and close out. Your computer should restart itself. Go to this site so that it can tell you how to do it. This will save me a lot of typing.

http://www.theeldergeek.com/xp_home_ins ... raphic.htm