ok so my win xp pro machine i use for gaming has been off for about a week. i turn it on, and bam there is a problem. Its POSTs fine, no errors are reported but it starts to load windows and it either just stays on the loading screen and goes no further or it reboots. same goes for safe mode, itll get to the screen where it loads all the drivers and then reboots after agp440.dll.

using the win xp cd as a boot disk i can get to the dos prompt under the recovery system and have very limited use. i ran scandsk and it says there is some errors on disk but nothing is specified. i think there is some bad file(s) or hard drive problem but dont know what to do. the only error i got was before i ran chkdisk was when i ran the DIR commmand on C:
said something about a problem emnnumiration or something. now im thinking its a bad file or a virus because when i swithed to D: which is a partition on the same physical disk DIR worked fine and there where no errors.

i could try reinstalling XP but id lose a ton of crap. would the fixboot command help? any advice?


only other thing i can think of is to buy a new harddrive, install windows on that as my primary drive and try to salvage whats on the old drive


thanks in advanced

Are you running a raid set-up?  If not try running either an OS repair or a soft restore.  ANother option would be for you to install a second hdd, make it the master and re-install your OS and software.  Your current drive will have to be made into a slave drive.  Once that is done scan the old drive for spyware/viruses and remove if found.  You will now have two drives.  One for your programs and a second on for your files.  Another thing to do is once the second drive is clear of infections, move your important files to the new hard drive, re-format the old drive and have it mirror your new drive.  So in the future if you have problems you can "break" the mirror and you will have an excact copy of your drive ready to go.

not a raid setup


how do i run an OS repair or a soft restore? i cant load windows so i cant do a  rollback to a previous date or anything

Boot with your OS disk in your optical drive.  You can do a OS repair from there or you can reload XP over the current version in the same directory.