I have a mess on my hands, and I hope someone can help me!!

Machine: ThinkPad T43p; Windows XP Pro SP2 ( but I can't find my OEM software anywhere. ; we do have a CD from XP Pro SP2 for my husband's Dell laptop, however.)

My original problem (the short version): Boot process would not finish. Had gotten as far as figuring out through msconfig that the culprit was probably a non-Microsoft service. In trying to figure out which one, I probably did something really stupid, because now ...

I can't boot up at all.

(I can get to IBM Rescue & Recovery partition, but only real option there is to revert back to factory settings, which means wiping everything off and starting over. Dr. Watson hardware diagnostics all report o.k.)

The black error screen gives me a bunch of choices - Choosing any of the Safe Mode options or Last Good Configuration gets me a blue screen that doesn't stay around long enough for me to read much of what's on there. I have been able to see that it suggests running chkdsk /f, but I have no idea how to get to the C prompt when I'm in a boot-failure loop.

Any ideas out there? I've been dealing with this since Sunday, and it's driving me batty.

contact IBM and see if you can get a copy of windows from them, if you can use it to do a repair install. I'm not sure if the Dell CD will work in this case, but if all is lost and you have to restore to factory, I would try the Dell CD first to see if it would work.

not sure what else you can do at this point.