laptop problem

Susan's copmuter won't boot (wondering who Susan is? look at the sig). it worked fine yesterday, then she turned it on and it says it can't find the operating system. i'm usually good about fixing copmuters, but this one beats me. nothing happened that would have made it go wrong. it just doesn't work now. i have a spare WinXP Pro Corporate Edition CD, but i don't want to have to boot from the cd, format and reinstall. she wants to keep all her files. it's a compaq laptop running a pentium 4 2.4 GHz, with 512 MB RAM. any help will be appreciated.

sounds like a dead harddrive

actually, the hard drive is working. i just shut it down for awhile and we went walking... came back and turned it on and it booted about halfway, then said that a file was missing or corrupt. so i'm going to throw in the XP CD tomorrow and do a repair. so it should replace that file, since it realizes that the file is bad.

i'll post an update as to whether it works or not.

did u put to computer into hybernation mode or standby mode? well if that so this can happen due to that or the dispaly driver incopatiblity also. i had faced this problem for several times and most of the time it happens after recovering from a hybernation. Most probably you can repair the windwos and get it going.

yeah it wasn't from a hibernation. she has it set never to go to sleep or hibernate. just screen saver. so that's not the problem. when i get home today i'm going to grab that XP CD and try it out. see if it fixes the computer.