OK,here's my problem,when I start up my desk top,I get my dell screen,then the windows start up screen comes on,then nothing!:mad: the fan in the tower is running and disk drive comes to life but there's nothing else happening nothing on the screen and the hard drive light on the tower is off,is this my hard drives way of saying its goodnight vienna,or something else going off?

The computer BIOS settings include alternative start-ups from disk drives and CD drives in a pre-set sequence. If needed you can change that start-up section in the BIOS immediately after switching your computer "on".

Once your computer can start from CD (the most "normal" setting), just put in the Windows CD that belongs to your system, and restart.
If the system starts loading the data from the CD, the problem is indeed in your hard drive. Attention : do not continue with this CD once you know what is the cause, or you delete everything on the C drive.

If you still have a "start-up disk" as was used by Windows 98, you can put that stiffy in the slot and see if the system loads it. If it does, you can check the various disk drives and check if the computer can read the hard drive. You can now also make back-ups from important data on your C-drive.

If you have a USB stick : these are often loaded with a complete computer system on the chip to allow starting other computer systems with your own computer settings, where ever you go. So may be you can also try that as an alternative to start up your computer.

If you have a faulty drive , it is possible to retrieve all or most of the data you have on it.
Contact your supplier to see for availability and costs involved.

Advice : new hard drives have at least a capacity of around 100 GB. If you have to buy a new hard drive : divide the disk into at least 4 or more partitions.
One for your Windows system only (20 GB), one for all your photo's and music (min. 20 GB), one for all your other data and back-up items, one for a possible second operation system (Linux?), and the remaining part as spare or whatever you want.
Again having a Windows 98 "start-up disk" would be extremely helpful to create these partitions.

Success !

:)

It doesn't sound so much like a bad drive, but a software issue. Can you boot to safe mode?

Yep,can boot to safe mode,but it won't let me boot from disk.

Then your drive is probably OK, I would boot to your XP CD and run a repair.