I installed XP SP 2 32 bit on a PC with one hard drive and an AMD  64
bit processor.

The one hard drive has two NTFS partitions. partition #1 (aka C:) has
xp sp 2 installed on it. partition #2 is empty.

I installed it and MIGHT have upgraded to SP 3 (I honestly don't
remember).

But it won't boot on its own. It never did (even before the possible
SP 3 upgrade). It was a clean system

I read through the xp docs on troubleshooting booting.

When I went to Recovery Console with the install CD. it asks for
Windows Administrator pw, and I logged on successfully.

I'm at my c drive (c:\windows).

I ran fixmbr and fixboot, but without declaring any target disk.

Is it required to specify the drive that the fixmbr will affect? If
you specify no drive or device, will it make the changes on the
current C: drive? (when I ran the commands without targets, it gave me
a success message).

I brought the Pc to the repair shop, and I'm wondering if the failure
to declare a target was the cause of the problem. I still think that
the mobo is the problem, but I want to know if I entered the correct
command.

next question, I ran bootcfg (namely rebuild,scan  and add). It
detected the c: drive and it seemed to run successfully when I added
it.

What is the relationship between fixmbr and bootcfg? Do you need to
run both comands? Does one depend on the other? If you need to run
both commands, do you need to reboot in between the time you run both
comands?

Robert Nagle