Reinstallation of XP- Possible/Effective?

[Scathe]

I have recently performed a wipe and my first clean installation of WinXP Pro- approximately 5 months ago- and everything ran very smoothly until a series of incidents that may have caused some problems with my data integrity- including some data apparently critical to some core system operations. About 50% of the time, when hot-connecting a plug-and-play device, the machine will create a page fault and crash; also, when burning CDs, it tends to crash when finalizing discs. I'm looking for an effective way to reinstall WinXP- I distinctly remember being able to simply reinstall 98 and 2K, thusly restoring damaged system files. I don't have the time nor the backup medium readily available, not being able to write CDs, to perform another wipe and reinstall. Ideas? Any help at all is appreciated.

 

[Lonyo]

How about partitioning your HDD and sticking all your files and stuff on a seperate partition, wiping XP off the main one and going with Win 2k instead? The data will be safe as long as you don't write over it when sorting out the 2k partition.

 

[Nothinman]

Find out which driver is the culprit, the BSOD should tell you.

 

[woodie1]

IMMIC - boot to your XP cd. Sometime during the installation it will detect the current install and give you the option to upgrade or clean install. Select the upgrade and it will reinstall without the loss of your other data.

 

[NokiaDude]

But is a re-install of XP as good as a clean install? If I were to re-install XP via upgrade onto a clean install of XP would it still retain the clean install status?