Question : XP Crash

My 5 year old Dell PC will not boot to XP Pro.  The Logo and progress bar show for about 10 seconds then it loops to the black DOS screen where you are offered the choice to start normally or last know good config etc..

The BIOS diagnostics returns Error 7 on that HDD.

How should I proceed? I cannot find the original XP CD for that CPU but I have an XP CD SP 3 from a different CPU on hand.  Can I boot to the CD that is not the original install and try to use the recovery console?  Is that the right way to begin?

Answer : XP Crash

Yes you should be able to use that disk, there are a couple of recovery commands that I would try first :

fixboot

and

fixmbr

also have you tried starting up in safe mode? as the bios completes, press F8 until the safe mode option comes up. This will rule out unneeded driver issues but if your HDD is knackered you may have a bigger problem. If you have an external HDD caddy for a 2 1/2" drive, you can try and mount that as an external drive to get your data back or try and use ghost to image it onto a new drive (you will need to add switches that ignore errors on the disk)