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you are a scholar and a gentleman, jaclaz!! Thank you very much! Your fix worked like a charm. Much obliged to you. would you recommend i use some sort of partition fixing software to sort out the unorthodox partitioning? Or should I just delete all partitions and start afresh again?

Ive done that now, thank you. Flashing underscore still there...

The original partitioning &formatting was done by the previous owner, its always had XP Pro..... I received it with a fresh installation of XP. I reformatted the boot drive using the preinstallation menu from the XP USB. It was always C drive, but got renamed when I deleted and recreated the partition. There was a Win32/Ramnit infection working its way through all the system files which prompted the reinstallation of xp. apparently running antiviruses couldnt guarantee disinfection. Which partition is appearing as FAT32? Both drives appear as NTFS on the disk management utility....I dont understand. Is this too far gone to fix?

Thanks for your time, jaclaz...this is now going beyond my expertise. NC10 is a samsung netbook...absence of CD drive meant I had to use the USB to install XP from. I have attached, as requested. BootSector_DriveC.zip

yes, it boots from usb Uploaded with ImageShack.us

Reinstalled xp on my NC10 using a thumb drive. Whole process went ok. However, when I try to boot without the thumb drive, i only get a blank screen with a flashing dash. It does boot from the thumb drive when it is inserted. I did a search for boot.ini on my HDD, but nothing came up. Where should it be? Shall I copy the file from the USB to the root drive? The HDD has two partitions and XP is installed on E drive. Thats the second partition, so afaik, the command in the bootloader should be multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS The boot.ini on the USB is multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(2)\WINDOWS Presumably the HDD is rdisk1 when USB is primary boot source. Ive set rdisk to 0 and set HDD to primary......but I still get the flashing dash. I tried fixmbr from the recovery console to no avail. system partition is the C drive. according to DISKPART, that drive is partition 3 in disk 0. XP is on the smaller E drive, but there are two partitions appearing on diskpart of that size.....partition 1 is listed as extended and 2 as logical. i dont understand as there are only two partitions on my HDD. how do i go about this? many thanks in advance!