Beat you to it, Phoon. On the other thread. No good.  

That Windows Repair app Doc featured not too long ago. Would that be of any help?

I will have to take your word as what I uploaded was just something I found. I could not tell you what it means, what it does, it was some post laying around. I am not sure what a registry is! LOL

Kona. you have a day or so left. reinstall xp with the drive hooked up, maybe it will come to life. A last xp install for the road .

Look in your BIOS for a section called "boot devices"      on my xp rig I had to go to this section and set the rom drive to sata as it was recognized as ide. Just something to look at not sure if that is your problem.

So I found a solution. I booted into my Ubuntu Linux installation, ran a command on the command line and made a ISO from the Command & Conquer DVD since the burner works under Linux. Transferred that ISO file over to my Windows partition and used Daemon Tools to mount and install the game. After two patches the games is running fine. Don't know why I didn't think of this before. Thanks everyone for the help!

Good to hear KONA. One step closer. I got 6 days left before the funds are here. Looks like you'll be multi-booting. Three OS's. Nice! I'll wait till your rig is up and running smoothly before I think of more silliness to say. Have a ball!

YW. kona. The great thing about virtual discs is that you never get virtual scratches. Plus the ISO is alway there to be loaded, no rummaging around looking for the physical disc to load it. I have one DVD RW drive, and one virtual drive at all times, I gave it the drive letter :V so I could easily tell which is which.

For anyone who may want to go this route, here are the links again, both programs are free.

Hey Wiz....I've heard of virtual drives before. Do they act like real drives? I mean can you install things on them? Just curious.

Absolutely.You can mount an ISO (image file) into a virtual drive just like it was a actual DVD or Cd and install, play or open it.

Wow! I learned something new. This place is a goldmine! Thanks Wiz.

Ross, to install stuff ON a virtual drive, you'll need something like VMWare, or Oracle.

Thanks Jim. Now I know what it reminds me of. I did that with XP using Oracle. It was so butfugly I got rid of it. I din't want to use an OS on a little screen. I expected it to go full screen like a regular OS. At any rate I tried it and wasn't too impressed. Besides....if I do something like that again and screw it up yrag will consign me to skinners oblivion. lol

For those of you that use Daemon Tools, SlySoft has a free Virtual Clone Drive that is superior. It is less intrusive and works great with all versions of Windows. 

Also, it's kinda pointless to install a virtual drive program on Windows 8 since it has that ability already built in. 

Well, just to point out, Windows 7 Ultimate has it's own Backup ability too, but I prefer Easeus ToDo Workstation. Not all MS apps are superior to third party.

I also use Easeus Todo Workstation. It has its own version of safe mode, that's what I call it.