disabled boot drive from Control Panel, now can't boot

[RoaldEuller]

yes, its incredibly stupid.

but I had a drive that was beginnning to squeal and i figured I could disable my drives one at a time to see which one was squealing. Of course, disabling the drives through the control panel doesn't actually keep them from spinning, so the whole thing was an exercise in boneheaded stupidity.

Anyway, as soon as I disabled the c: drive the screen went blank (of course), and now when i try to reboot it complains about a non-system drive and asks me to insert a system disk.

did I mention that this is a home-built system and it doesn't have a floppy, so i can't boot off the floppy?

I tried booting off the XP install CD, but it won't except that either (this seems odd to me).

Is there any salvation here?

thanks in advance...

 

[kingnoobe]

Sorry I would keep expermenting with booting from the cd. Go to bios and make sure it boot from cd is the first boot option. I'm not a genius but to me it sounds like you're really gonna have to get that cd working.. Then just try to do a repair. Also you could try somebody else's cd and do a repair.

The only other thing is you could try completing disable the that harddrive. Then try installing your cd on a different one... Again though this requires you cd to be working, so that has to be a must.