Ok huge problem. Was fixing my friends pc (he dropped it off for the weekend for me to fix.) Turns out he hasn't installed any updates since he bought the PC. It has home XP OEM ;/. It's a dell dimension 8200. Anyway Here's what I did. I ran norton 2004 and found and fixed some problem. Installed adaware run it, fixed the problems. I ran spybot SD fixed some problems. THen I restarted. I then proceeded to install Windows SP2. I restarted. Everything went smooth. He had a weird issue I had never seen before. If you opened his E drive (cdrw drive) it had you know the whole "files waiting to be written to CD." Well somehow they added the windows folder to that. SO i tryed to remove it but you couldn't. There were so many files saying inuse or write protected. Well I deleted all but thoes. (remember these are temporary files not the actual windows folder???) So I went to safe mode and tryed to clean things up there and still it said some where being in use. So i decided not to bother with it. Restarted back to windows xp home reguarly. Insalled two things while running adaware again: WindowsFX (which I had never used before but had heard it was pretty cool.) and desktop X. I restarted the computer once they finished installing and now it gets to the screen blue "welcome" screen but instead it has the windows logo and just says windows XP home. It's not fully locking up because if i hit alt+tab I see two things one says windows xp logon and the other says the same when i toggle through them. I can't Ctrl+Alt+Del either... I tryed doing this in safemode, its the same problem. I trying going back to last known working config and it does the same thing.
So the only thing I could think to do was to go into recovery console (because the repair option isn't availible) and try to redo the bootini and maybe something got messed up there or even run a checkdisk. Well there is an administrator password set and he doesn't know it. I've tryed everything guys I'm desperate. Anything you guys could do to help me would be great. They have tons of stuff on this pc they need to save, about 18 gigs worth so I really don't want to reformat. I'm willing to do pretty much anything else if theres a way I can go around and back it all up then reformat. I dunno I just want it fixed.
Thanks Guys!
So the only thing I could think to do was to go into recovery console (because the repair option isn't availible) and try to redo the bootini and maybe something got messed up there or even run a checkdisk. Well there is an administrator password set and he doesn't know it. I've tryed everything guys I'm desperate. Anything you guys could do to help me would be great. They have tons of stuff on this pc they need to save, about 18 gigs worth so I really don't want to reformat. I'm willing to do pretty much anything else if theres a way I can go around and back it all up then reformat. I dunno I just want it fixed.
Thanks Guys!