Last night I experienced something new. Upon turning on my PC, windows failed to start. I recieved an error message that windows/system32/config/system is corrupt. This occured after installing the latest FireFox update and reboot - hmmm....

Set BIOS to boot from CD and tried the PC's system restore CD. The machine kept hanging, and it never was able to repair. It would just hang - for a long time, then reboot. Sometimes I'd get an error message that some other system file was corrupt and that it didn't even try to repair it. So I swapped the drive out with a spare 10 GB HD and installed WinXP on that (one sentance for 45 minutes of screwing around there) Then I was able to plug in my bad(?) HD as a slave and was able to see and recover some of the files off of it.

Finally, with a working OS on the 10 GB HD, I was able to start screwing around with the bad(?) HDD. After several abortive attempts, still very limited luck. Here's a side question for you - I thought WinXP had built in CD writting - yet I had to install Nero to actually back anything up onto DVD. Is there an option I missed or is DVD writting not supported by native WinXP?

Anyway, I wasn't sure if my HDD was bad, my files were just randomly corrupted, I had a virus, or what. So I installed, updated, and ran AVG - for 35 minutes. It found nothing.

So I ran ScanDisk, went and had dinner, and when I came back, the computer had rebooted and looked good. No idea if it repaired anything or not - apparently it didn't stop at the report screen like I would have expected. I still wasn't back in my old WinXP though.

So I unplugged the 10 GB HDD and now was finally able to reinstall WinXP on the bad(?) HDD. But it never bothered checking/detecting my old version of WinXP - it just installed a brand new version of WinXP next to the old one. So when I restart it gives me a list of 3 WinXP's to select from (I had to try this several times - so apparently I actually installed two new WinXPs). If I select the bottom one, I still get an error message and it fails to launch. If I select the top one, I launch WinXP and the PC works - however it's a blank OS. I can no longer access any of my old documents that were in My Documents. I assume this is because I'm not logged into windows as that user (User1), which was a passworded account - so It's not letting me into User1's Documents and settings.

None of my old applications seem to work anymore either - probably because they're looking for the old WindowsXP register to run. I'd like to just do a wipe and reinstall, but it sure would be nice to recover my documents from my User1 account as well as recover my Outlook e-mails and addy book. Any tips on how I can do that?