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?
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?
i'm really trying to avoid that though... there's a lot of software that i'd really rather not have to re-install 
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