Wondered if anyone could advise. When I turn on my Laptop it goes through the usual XP start up stuff, then goes to a blue screen saying boot record not found (or something like that).

It won't start in Safe Mode or anything. I wonder if the hard drive has died?

Yea, it's your hard-drive thats buggered up..

If it's doing the usual XP stuff then the drive is working. Are you sure it's not just the post messages you are seeing?

If it can't see the drive then your not likely to be getting XP messages or a blue screen!

I guess you have tried the F8 on startup, does it get to the options menu offering safe mode?

Boot off a windows CD, select the recovery console, if that finds a drive and you get a prompt type chkdsk /r and see what it does.

brothers comp did same
totally wrecked the main drive
xp disc couldnt even see the c drive
did a reinstall and seems to be working fine now
(think it was a bad virus)

if you can still see the drive and XP start to load its probably either corrupt boot files on the disk, or the disk has developed bad sectors.

does it ever to a checkdisk ? if not, dont skip when it asks to do it, it may be able to recover and boot cleanly allowing you to backup your data before getting a new hard disk