by icecube » Sat Jan 14, 2006 1:21 am
The easisest way to fix things would be to pull the hard drive and buy another one. Restore the O/S to the new drive using the restore disk and then hook up the old drive as a slave and harvest the data you need.
There are many different XP Cd's Home, Pro, OEM, upgrade,W/sp1, W/sp2. Your product key will not work if you have the wrong XP version.
Another thing you could do, is buy a USB hard drive case and put the problem drive in it and hook it up to a working PC. You might be lucky enough to get it back in workiing shape with a virus scan at that point. You should be able to harvest the data.