What error messages are you getting? Are you getting any motherboard/BIOS beeps? And, yes, your friend may be able to at least get you into Windows this way to enable further repair. I'd recommend an install over the top of your existing install, or a repair install before trying it though.

Zenmonk I was attempting to configure audio drivers for a recording studio. I was getting very close to everything working when I accidentally let update install service pack 3. That canceled all my progress so I tried uninstalling 3 unsucsessfully. I then tried various restore points. The system became unstable and I started getting increasingly frequent blue screens until eventually no boot. I imagine the registery became conflicted between the two service packs. My friend who essentially built the machine loaded the OS off of one of his discs now can't find the original disc. So we tried with several other discs to reinstall and even do a fresh install on another partition but we keep getting the error message ACPI.SYS corrupt.I did some looking into ACPI and found too many possible scenarios to nail down the specific problem. I thought it might have something to do with my Toshiba CDROM but I tried using another CDROM and got the same message. My friend kept working on it long after I gave up and now he says that the computer doesn't even recognise the drive any more!Wetern 500g, C drive is NTFS. 2 more Partitions on drive are Fat32. Phonix Award Bios, AMD64x2 dualcore. My machine has been dark for a week now. My friend took the drive home but I'm waiting to hear something/anything. That drive is loaded with my business files and I have no re$ources for an expert. I pretty sure there were no Bio beeps. There was some extemely vauge error message on the original OS failure but I can't remember sorry. Thanks for your response. I'm new to forum, I hope this wasn't too long.-Mark