hey i got a second hand computer with windows xp on it but and no recovery disk :(.....i think there something wrong with the hard drive because everytime i boot it up it come up with error message ..a disk read error occured press ctrl+alt+delete to restart so i thought that i could put it into safe mode and see if there was anyway to fix the problem but the f8 option doesnt work and it cant be anything to do with the keyboard cause it works fine on other computers and its not a usb keyboard so if anyone out there has a solution to my problem it would be recieved greatfully :)

Sounds to me like your hard disk is broke :(

But the valuable bit would be the 25-character XP registration sticker on the case (somewhere). If you've got that, then any XP CD you can get a hold of should be fine for installing XP on a new hard disk.

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