Hi guys,

any reasonable suggestions would be appreciated!

I'm having PC problems. Whenever I start up, the initial boot sequence runs fine, but once windows starts trying to load (just before the win XP is displayed) I get an error - "WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 folder is corrupted." it then has something about trying to do a repair with the original windows cd.

So anyway, I put the cd in, then when it gets the the first options screen I hit "R" for repair. It tells me it can't detect the hard disk. So I reboot, and try a full install - same thing. But it can detect the hard disk (how else would it know to look for windows\system32?). And the hard disk appears in the BIOS and on the startup screens.

Regardless, I tried new SATA leads, a new HDD, new motherboard and new RAM - same thing. It detects the hard disk, but can't do much else - it appears it can read from the drive, but can't write to it (and even with a brand new HDD, when I try to install windows it says it can't detect the hard disk).

The only thing left is to change the CPU, but I don't have a spare CPU (Athlon XP Socket A) lying around and would rather not waste the money on getting an old CPU which may or may not fix the problem!