Change the boot order from your bios settings. you can access this when the system load screen comes up. it is the first thing you see when you turn the computer on. You want to make sure it tries to boot from the cd drive before the hard drive.

It might be that the only problem you have is that the boot sector of your drive was corrupted, in which case, a repair-install will work fine for you.

Changed the boot order to CD first still read the cd, then gave me same error again.

I do not know why your sys will not boot fom your recovery cd... but perhaps you can borrow someone's XP installation cd and try that? This is what you need to do when you can finally boot from a cd...
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/330184

Run a registry doctor and regcure by slaving your drive in another machine

Tried to use an xp installation disk and did same thing. I have another machine I can slave it too, but the other machine has Win xp pro on it and the bad drive has win xp home. Can I still do it and if I can once I get it up, what do I do.

Thanks

lets do! but will regcure or registry doctor fix the registry on a slaved hdd.

if you can slave the drive save your stuff and format it then reinstall XP. while the drive is slaved see if there is a second partition. if there is then you should be able to run the recovery option for your PC. i also notice the other poster told you to change your bios boot order and you have not responded if you did.

Yeah, I changed it and it says reading from cd...hit any key, which I do and then pops up with same error message. how do I check to see if there is a second partition? And if there is do I still need the recovery cd to run it?

Thanks for the help

Phil

Finally able to get access to the drive...sort of.
Took out drive and put in another machine, only thing that I could think of that why it would pop up on my machine was that the CMOS battery seems to be going bad, keep getting a checksum error on start up.
Anyway, brought it up and had hit repair, then had to run chkdsk before I could rebuild. But chkdsk failed after 25%, said it had unrecoverable problems. So I tried reformatting, after about 2 hours it also pops up and said that it couldn't be reformatted because disk was bad. Have no idea what happen, everything was working fine until one day just shut down. Guess the drive is just bad.
So my question is this...is there anyway to get files off that drive, mainly just pictures and such?

Thank you
Phil