Hard drive failure/crash

I tried installing 64-bit Windows on my hard drive yesterday. Now I'm getting a "bootmgr missing" error. Or when I try to boot from the USB, it says something about being invalid or broken??? Any idea what I should do?

It says "Invalid or damaged booting partition" on my screen

It sounds like your hard drive might have kicked the bucket. Maybe try checking the BIOS first to see if it even detects the drive—if not, you could always try swapping out the SATA cables to see if that does the trick..

EDIT: Have you tried running a clean installation of some other version of Windows just to see if the computer will actually boot up at all?

It’s reading it just fine. Even when I boot up a different version of Windows from a separate hard drive, it picks it right up—I can move files back and forth without any issues. I’m going to try some other versions of Windows, though. Right now, it won't recognize the 64-bit Windows, so I'll give the x86 version a shot instead.

Why not just install a standard version of Windows XP instead of one of those "wild" custom builds?

Maybe try a different version of Windows first—and definitely make sure you set your BIOS to AHCI mode for the hard drive before you start the installation.

So, I somehow managed to get XP32 up and running, but now I’ve hit a snag. My processor frequency won't budge past 1GHz, even though I’m rocking a 2.5GHz dual-core. On top of that, Cool'n'Quiet is totally disabled on me.