The operating system that came with the computer.

okay and where do i aquire such a disk for xp (2003)

I'll do it, but it'll cost you a pretty penny to ship it. Would you rather me try to walk you though it? Have we done this before?

has who done what before yeah walkin me tru it would be cool it would have to be via phone obviously

I was thinking more remote desktop connectionish

Wouldn't the RDC fail during the reformat?

reformat is a last resort LOL

well what is my other options does anybody have a recovery disc for xp 2003 i could borrow or buy

When I was much younger and liked to play with everything (including registry) it was often my first resort. Of course back then, it was a 20 minute process.

Manufacturers used to send a restore disc or two with the computer, back in the day.

Later on, they just started putting the contents of the discs in a partition of the hard drive. In this case, you'll see a "Press F## for recovery" message just before Windows loads. If you see a prompt like that (on HP'*, it'* F11), you can recover that way.

(Sidenote: that and base-2 math are why your system'* 160 GB hard drive shows up in My Computer as only about 140 GB.)