Started to check out the problem.
Put XP disc in drive and rebooted, came up perfectly! However at no time did any booting information appear. First visible screen was the XP screen followed by the desktop. Only problem was screen came up with 1024x768 rather than my selected format of 1600x1200 but this was happening before.
I changed the screen size, changed the 'my computer' setting to not reboot on failure which required a restart. I restarted the machine to find it stayed blank! Put in a livecd, disc lights flashed as it was (apparently) read but no screen appears. Tried holding 'del' while booting but no bios screen.
Re-inserted the XP disc, reboot, lights flash and up comes XP straight into my desktop!
What on earth??? Seems the only way I can boot it up is with the XP disc. I would assume it is actually getting the XP from the disc but it is using the harddrive version of desktop so I assume its booted up the C drive O/S.
If the xp disc gets booted it should, logically, boot up a linux live cd(especially one it has run before all this problem happened.
Leaves me up a creek with out a paddle!
Can't even use a cd to wipe the hard drive and start afresh. Mind you, I don't want to do that yet, even if I could. It's a lot of work to wipe, reinstall XP, then SH3 then GW2 etc.
p.s. I'm lucky at present that I have more than one machine in use, so I can talk to you on one while the flash new beasty is being beastly.