ACK SOMEBODY HELP..... repairing windows xp installation

[gopunk]

a lot of this has been my fault, a lot of it not...

my mom had something weird going on with her computer where it would restart randomly. i stupidly thought, "well lets make sure it's all patched up and then go fix things". well during the windows update patching procedure, the damn thing restarts... but some driver funkyness must have happened because it would just go to this screen saying "windows did not start properly... blah blah... safe mode.... blah last good configuration... blah". there was no way to get around this screen... safe mode didn't work.

so i took an xp pro cd to do a repair... all was going good but after the first part of the setup, after it had rebooted, there were a bunch of stop errors, blue screens... i rebooted and it went into the screens you see when you install xp for the first time... you know with the time remaining on the left hand side, and then they have various product features flashing in the main part of the screen. anyways i freaked out and thought that there had been some glitch and that windows was re-installing itself (i.e., i would lose all the data on the hd), so i rebooted it. i was just not very trusting because there had been a lot of "setup could not copy filename" and now these weird stop errors.... stupid thing i did #1.

at this point, i did stupid thing #2 and burned a xp pro sp1a cd, and tried to use that. it got to the end, where it was about to reboot and then finish the setup (the point at which i did stupid thing #1 the first time). except it just keeps on rebooting over and over after the "press any key to boot from cd". so it never gets a chance to complete the repair installation.

and now, the xp pro non-sp1a cd does not work, when i try to do a repair installation, setup does not even recognize that Xp is already installed... it just asks me if i want to install Xp on that partition, create a new partition, or delete one. no option to repair! i'm guessing the sp1a cd must have overwrote some file that indicates what is installed and what is not.

long story short, CAN SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME??? either by getting the sp1a repair to work, or by getting the non-sp1a cd to recognize the previous installation of XP.

btw it is weird because the files that setup can not copy are always different from before, and the stop errors only happen every other time i go through the setup.


cliff notes:

when i try with non-sp1a cd:
does not recognize previous installation of windows, so there is no option to repair

when i try with sp1a cd:
finishes first part of repair, but upon reboot, it goes into a continuous loop of reboots


WHAT I THINK I NEED:
how do i make the non-sp1a setup recognize the previous installation of XP? is there some file i need to copy?

 

[mechBgon]

Can you give a quick rundown of what the hardware is? Details about the brand/model of the motherboard, the RAM and the power supply would help us get a feel for the age and quality level of the computer. If it's an off-the-shelf system like an EMachines, Dell, Gateway, then brand/model or some specs would be ok.

While I'm asking, what was the original OS, WinXP Home or WinXP Pro? Was it kept protected by a firewall and up-to-date antivirus software or did it get rather neglected on the security stuff?

 

[gopunk]

Originally posted by: mechBgon
Can you give a quick rundown of what the hardware is? Details about the brand/model of the motherboard, the RAM and the power supply would help us get a feel for the age and quality level of the computer. If it's an off-the-shelf system like an EMachines, Dell, Gateway, then brand/model or some specs would be ok.

While I'm asking, what was the original OS, WinXP Home or WinXP Pro? Was it kept protected by a firewall and up-to-date antivirus software or did it get rather neglected on the security stuff?

sure... asus p4c800-e motherboard... 1gb pc3200 hyperx kingston ram... two wd raptors (10k rpm) in sata raid 1, p4 2.4ghz cpu (800 mhz bus), power supply... i think it came with the case, antec sonata.

xp pro... i had zonealarm on it, but the NAV subscription had run out. i installed a new copy yesterday but it would always die before the scan got completed. i tried to patch it whenever i happened to be using it... i'm leaning more towards some weirdass spy/malware/virus than a hacker or anything.

 

[mechBgon]

Start with this thread, if you don't already have that taken care of. The i875P chipset calls for slightly slack timings and a voltage bumparoo with "fancy" memory. It was quite a headache back then. 😛 I'm hoping that will erase the variety pack of file errors, crashes and bluescreens you've been getting, if they're hardware-related.

In the end, when you do get it alive again, can I suggest making your mom a Limited account for daily usage, so that even if she gets suckered into trying to install spyware/adware, her account will lack the power to do so. And if a virus/Trojan gets control of her account, it'll still have only a Limited-class account and not full Admin powers. If you need a pretty easy-to-set-up antivirus software, MWave.com has McAfee VirusScan 8.0 OEM for $12 if I remember correctly. You'll still want to go through all the configuration stuff and probably disable its little pop-up informational alert feature.