i have an XPS 400, bought in late 2005. has been working fine since. within past few weeks, started getting blue screen errors. within past week, system won't boot. both dell diagnostics (when i boot from the Dell Resource CD that came with the system) and Fix-It Utilities 7 recognize the hard drive and identify no problems with drive. system has the drive that came with it, as well as a new seagate drive i installed recently (the problems with the computer predate the drive installation). however, when i try to boot directly from primary drive (the one that came with the system), i get error "Missing OS or unformatted active partition".

with Fix-It Utilities i can view the full directories on both drives, and can even view contents of text files, so the drives seem intact. however, can't boot Windows XP from the drive that came with the system. unfortunately, i don't have the Dell Recovery CD. i am trying to decide whether to call Dell (system out of warranty, so i gotta pay!) or take it to a local repair shop. seems like problem can be fixed relatively easily with a recovery CD, but i don't have one, and hadn't made one before the crash. any suggestions? (by the way, i tried ctrl-F11 - didn't work, got the "Missing OS" message. also booted into the hidden utility partition on the disk - all tests passed, except one test indicated cross-linked files on the primary drive.) any help/suggestions would be much appreciated, been without my primary system for 10 days, and it's cramping my style.....