I tried that. With a different disk format was good but when trying to install xp i got stuck in the same place, and again putting a hard drive with a good win xp loaded should work, or if it was the hard drive why did it work fine when I took it from that computer and put it into a working computer. Sorry but this is really getting to me. Could it be the motherboard, I know he told me that he left the computer on the night before it went bad but when he came back the next morning the computer was off and upon turning it on he got the system file failure message. I've read info on google where people think it could be caused by hardware but was not able to exactly pinpoint to what it is and Microsoft is no help