Ok, here goes. I am trying to fix a Toshiba laptop for a friend. When welcome screen comes up, and you click on the user, it begins to boot into XP, but automatically logs back out. I cannot log into Windows XP, even in Safe Mode. I want to reinstall his XP, but cannot boot from the XP disc. I checked all BIOS boot settings, they are set correctly, as I can boot to other media, like MiniPE disc. I have tried more than one XP disc, and I cannot boot to it. Tried those same XP discs on another comp, they booted fine. The only thing that is different about this laptop is the hard drive is SATA. I thought I could still boot to the XP disc but I would need to load the drivers via the "Press f6 to load 3rd party drivers" but I cant even get an XP disc to boot. Any suggestions? I'm at a loss. I could understand if nothing booted, but only the XP discs won't boot. Like I said, I've tried at least 5 different XP discs. Am I doing something wrong?

If you have a floppy drive you can boot the Microsoft XP setup using six floppies.

Try burning a copy of the XP CD and see if the copy will boot.

OR , it may be a virus aimed at windows , if this is true download a boot disc and fdisk and format it.

Unfortunately, I dont have a floppy drive, I tried burning a copy of the XP disc, no luck. If I fdisk and format the drive, do I need the SATA drivers in order to see the drive since it is SATA? Can you recommend a particular boot disc?

http://www.bootdisk.com/

Assumin you have the bios set correctly to boot from cd and the fact that the XPdisk works in other machines, I would say a hardware problem.
I would be interested to know if it would boot via USB.

I will try the boot disc. I'm not savvy enough to boot via USB but I will look into that. Thank you guys so much for all the help you've provided so far. I'll let you know which options work. Thanks again for the help so far.

Ok, I finally was able to boot to an original XP disc. Unfortunately the number didn't work with that disc, so I finally got a Student\Teacher version to boot and installed all the way through. After that, I was able to boot to the correct XP home disc and reinstall his legal version of XP. Now I can boot to all the XP discs I couldn't boot to before. Doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but it's installed and works, so I'm done. Thank you again to all you guys who recommended possible solutions. Thanks again.

Everyone here is glad to know you got you stuff up and runnin.