xpPro CRASH...and <R>ecover or Restore does not help. 1

[nat101]

My xpPro system wouldn't boot due to certain file missing. Seems like a virus caused it. I tried the following:
A) 1. Boot from xpPro CD, choose recover.
2. It does not agree on the password, so possibly the virus took care of that too.
3. I wish recover would allow an admin equivalent user...
Anyhow, there are better options since I DO have a backup, so...

B) 1. Boot from CD, choose to install a new setup on another partition. The old crashed \windows is on c:, the new on E:\.
2. That (sort of)works, and I can connect to another xpPro machine on the lan, which should be great because that machine has a recent back of this, backed up via the included backup program.
3. I choose to restore the STATE of my machine, including all users documents.
4. The restore goes well, and reboot.
5. I get a fuzzy video login (with the recovered usernames) but the machine is LOCKED and frozen. No keyboard (even caps or numlock toggle) or mouse movement, and there is a mouse cursor frozen in the middle.
6. I try rebooting in either safe or vga mode, with the same result.

Now what?
PS. It's been about 30 hours since my crash, and have tried numerous variations of the above methods. I am about to go nuts.

Thank you for helping.
-nat

 

[linney]

WinRescue ?????

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=Winrescue&spell=1

 

[nat101]

Thanks.

If anything valuable is to be retained from this thread, I would say that beware of oem pre-installed xp, and be aware that many articles in the knowledgebase assumes plain shrink-wrapped windows(or include oem in you keywords), and most of all, if you have windows xpHome pre-installed (Dell, HP, etc.), and you want to upgrade to xpPro, do so thru your hardware vendor only.

-nat