Rather then make a new thread I simply will ad my problem to this one. I too am having the "disk boot failure" situation. My problem started about a couple days ago when I turned on my computer and about 20 minutes later a message appears within the toolbar area stating something along the lines of, "warning, system 32/"" ""/"' ""/.exe may be corrupt". I ignored it and opened up Firefox and then about 1 minute into my web browsing the same message appeared again this time saying firefox.exe was corrupt.

I sent the error report to Microsoft and then I received a link to a solution page on their website. It said to open up the command prompt and enter, "dskchk" or something like that. After I restarted my computer I then received the disk boot error.

I sorta jumped the gun like an ***** and inserted the XP disk without asking for help. What I think I did was installed another copy of XP on the same hard drive or something like that and now when I start up my computer I shows to Windows XP options. The first one works but the second one doesn't and the screen just goes black. What the hell have I done?

alphaint, your "not much more than a comment" was just the bit of information I needed to fix my Disk Boot Failure issue. It led me to rearrange my jumper settings and now all is working perfectly. Thank you so much! Allow me to explain my situation below:

Thank you for this thread Centurio! You are a true tech troubleshooter. And just as you concluded, my issue also had to do with my hardware. My situation is that my hard drive and CD-rom are sharing an ATA/IDE cable; it is a splitter that allows TWO devices to be connected to ONE connector on the motherboard (it's a newer board that supports SATA, so what I need to do is buy a new SATA hard drive, but still saving for that).
Because of the shared connection, I had the jumper settings on my hard drive set to Master and on my CD-drive to Slave (seems like common sense to me). In BIOS, I had the Boot Priority set right and everything was recognized. For whatever reason, after having a fresh Windows XP installation running and working perfectly, whenever I would go to restart, my motherboard's boot utility program would begin and show me the boot error. However, like most in this thread, inserting the Windows installation disk at turn on would somehow be the thing needed to jumpstart windows and then my hard drive installation would kick in and take over from there and run just fine...until next restart; same thing all over again.
It was alphaint's comment that led me to tinker with the jumpers. Here is the ONLY configuration that works for me: CD-rom set to Master and Hard-drive with no jumpers at all...that's right, just take them off and set them aside! For some reason, this is how it needs to be set up and at turn-on, everything works like a charm with Windows starting from the Hard Drive right at the get-go. Thanks to all who have posted!

Ben