In BIOS make sure the CDROM is set to boot before the Hard Drive

 

Boot from XP CD with CD in drive 

When you see "Welcome to Setup" press R to start the Recovery Console.

 

When prompted put in the administrator password, and if you don't have one press enter.

 

At the RC's command prompt type in
chkdsk /r  (there is a space before /)
ENTER

 

 

If that does not fix it go back to the Recovery Console and type
CHKNTFS /D
ENTER

 

This should restore CHKDSK behaviour to its default/normal behaviour (regardless of whether your drives are fat or ntfs).

Hi and thanks for the advise.

 

I tried chkdsk /r in Recovery Console but upon bootup the machine still launched into chkdsk.

 

I cannot find CHKNTFS command in Recovery Console. Is it standard to Dell XP installations?

What do you mean by "cannot find CHKNTFS command in Recovery Console"?

 

Do you mean it won`t work?

 

You just type it in at the prompt.

 

Back in the Recovery Console, try typing at the prompt

 

chkntfs /x c:

(This disables chkdsk from running on drive C)

 

If you can`t get the commands to run test the hard drive with the Dell Diagnostics