jasonvaughan

Thanks to you both for your suggestions. Can I just ask, once I've got my new HDD and it's all up and running and I've transferred the data off the old drive, should I just bin the old one or can it be reformatted and used ?

Cheers for all the advice wolfeymole. Can i use an external HDD such as an Iomega Silver Series Portable Hard Drive and then just take all the data off and reinstall XP from scratch onto the desktop?

I'm booting from the XP CD and carefully following the instructions but when I get to step 5 the screen I am looking at says: select an item in the list: to set up windows xp on the selected item, press enter to create partition, press c delete partition, press d underneath this there is a list: -: partition1 FAT c: partition2 NTFS unpartitoned space e: partition 3 FAT32 If i select c: the next screen gives me the option to setup using this partition but does not mention Repair. should i select 'continue setup' or will this just start to overwrite my files? Cheers.

Wolfeymole Thanks for all your help but it seems from your last post that I have reached the end of the line with what I can do myself and need to get either another HDD or find a firm to take the data off for me. It's very frustrating that even though I have the XP CD and I'm pretty sure the HDD itself is not at fault that I can't just repair whatever file(s) has been corrupted and get back up and running. If anyone else can think of a solution please let me know. One final thought, is it not possible to download the repair module from the internet and then use that to fix my system???

Thanks for help so far but things seem to be getting worse. I now don't even get to the bsof as i get the message: windows could not start because the following file is missing \windows\system32\config\sysem i understand that by following the earlier guidance i was deleting this file with the intention of replacing it with a new version but as stated in my post below i was unable to enter the repair commands. I've read the suggested link on performing a repair install but i dont have the repair feature on my PC and 'warning no. 2' basically tells me that if i do the XP install without backing up my data (which I cant do) then I'm going to lose it. Is there anyway out of my predicament???

I ran chkdsk /r again and then tried safe mode but it failed. I then moved on to following the instructions in How to recover from a corrupted registry that prevents Windows XP from starting but when I got to the part where I typed copy c:\windows\repair\system c:\windows\system32\config\system I got the message: the system cannot find the file specified. Any ideas as to why this should be? Thanks.

Thanks for the quick reply. The only way I can get to the command prompt is to run the recovery module and then exit out of it (is there a better way?) Once I get to c:\ prompt I type System Root\System32\Drwtsn32.exe -I (as detailed in the link you sent) but all i get is a message saying command not recognised. I might be missing something really obvious here but please tell me what it is. The link also said that I should: "examine the system to see if it has a third-party GINA DLL. To do this, locate the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon Value = GinaDLL REG_SZ" Is this something anyone can do or is it beyond the non-specialist? Thanks.

Can anyone stop me from going insane? I uninstalled Symantec Suite from my Dell desktop running XP but when I re-booted the following message appeared - stop: c000021a {fatal system error} the windows logon process system process terminated unexpectedly. I've tried safe mode and last working mode boot up and both just bring me to the same screen. I have the XP CD and have tried the Recovery Console but that didn't work either. Ideally I'd like to get my PC back up and running again but even if I could just somehow copy my files onto a flash drive and then reinstall XP that would be better than the situation I'm in now. Any advice gratefully received! Thanks.