Hi vece,
I'm not familiar with boot sector virus, but I understand that it shdn't affect your boot device settings. This setting is located in ur BIOS config, while boot sector virus resides on ur harddisk. When ur comp boots up, the program flow goes to ur BIOS 1st. Boot sector virus resides on ur harddisk. Thus i think logically if u boot up from CD-ROM, bootsector shdn't affect u at this stage.
My opinion is:
- if u'r very very sure ur 1st boot device boots from CD-ROM, then ur winXP CD is not bootable. Original winXp CD is bootable. But if u just copy out the files to another CD, that new CD will not be bootable. This is bcoz for a CD to be bootable, there r some specific files that is to be copied to a certain location on ur CD (google for bootable CD). I tried created 1 some time back, n it took me some time.
- Using a bootable diskette is a good idea, it'll help isolate ur problem (it'll b good to test ur bootable CD / diskette on another PC too). u can enable write protect on ur floppy (by opening the small hole at the corner) before u boot from this floppy in case there is a boot virus and it trys to copy itself to ur floppy.
BTW, while i was experimenting with bootable CDs, for those failed CDs I also receive the error "NTLDR is missing". I think during those failed attempts, I created bootable CDs that is only able to read FAT (win98 filesystem) and not NTFS. Then I use them to boot up a NTFS win2000 system. Might this be related to ur problem as well?
cheers