Crash of XP Pro Upgrade

[rschultz]

I have an HP8765C Windows ME which I upgraded to XP Pro
when it XP first came out. My computer has since slowly
crashed to where my attempts to repair it thru XP has
failed. I'm not sure if a full install will destroy all
my data on my one partitioned hard drive or only write
over the previous corrupted XP installation. The
computer currently conducts a self file system check,
restarts itself, then stops due to registry file failure
of system root\ssystem32\config\software or its log or
alternate, then dumps the physical memory to disk. This
is continuous do-loop...Can anyone help by telling me if
I will lose my data on the harddrive if I do a fresh
install?


Ray

[athanasian_creed]

rschultz wrote:
> I have an HP8765C Windows ME which I upgraded to XP Pro
> when it XP first came out. My computer has since slowly
> crashed to where my attempts to repair it thru XP has
> failed. I'm not sure if a full install will destroy all
> my data on my one partitioned hard drive or only write
> over the previous corrupted XP installation. The
> computer currently conducts a self file system check,
> restarts itself, then stops due to registry file failure
> of system root\ssystem32\config\software or its log or
> alternate, then dumps the physical memory to disk. This
> is continuous do-loop...Can anyone help by telling me if
> I will lose my data on the harddrive if I do a fresh
> install?
>
>
> Ray

Have you installed SP-1 ?? If so, there was a patch from HP necessary to
install before installing SP-1 or else you suffered problems similiar to the
one's you're experiencing.
If you are unable to load Windows now, i would do a clean install, install
the patch from HP then do the updates after that (SP-1 +)
I had an HP 8755C on which i did a clean install of XP (formerly ME) that
suffered a HD failure 10 months later (not related to the patch - not
necessary for my model) but a co-worker had HD failure which was the result
of not having the patch before the SP-1 install.
You may or may not find your data intact upon reinstallation but options
seem limited at this point - hopefully you have backups of any important
data.
It would appear that you should be looking into a new HD sooner than later
!!


Good luck,

Ray