Restoring corrupt Windows XP Home

I need some advice, so I'm very grateful for any help. My Windows XP Home installation has become corrupted, due to various issues including somehow creating a dynamic rather than a basic partition, missing hal.dll file and other problems. I've tried all the solutions I can find, with no success, so I've had to re-partition (and loose all my data).

I have a TI image, made from when I had some or all of the problems. When I restore the image, presumably it will re-install the bad configuration. If this is so, is there any way round this so that I have all my programs and data, but not the corrupted operating system and/or partition?

 

Try using the explore image wizard and let it mount the image as a virtual drive, you should be able to copy your data files in an employer window.
However you will need to reinstall the programs as the registry entries will not be correct or non-existent

 

Sorry about the lost data. For future reference, you can boot from the TI recovery CD and make an image even of a badly messed up system and recover data from that.

The image you have is older, but it's an image of the system partially messed up. You can recover the data from that but not your programs. They will need to be reinstalled.

The best thing to do now is to do a clean install of Windows or use the manufacturer's recovery CD to put your system back to good working condition. Do all the Windows and antivirus updates and then install TrueImage and make an image of this updated system. Install all your programs and make another image. Next, Explore your old image and copy the data files over to your clean installation. Finally, make a new image for future use.

 

Hi NineToTheSky - since you have scratched you old install, you are free to experiment I would use the Rescue CD to load the old image, with all its weird errors. Then use the WinXP Recovery Console to do a Repair Install of O/S. The repair process should install a fresh copy of any missing DLL's, and you can probably use the Recovery Console afterwards to edit/rebuild the BOOT.INI.

If you are lucky, this will give you a running system close to what you had before.

 

Thanks for all your replies, which have confirmed what I thought, which is that I can only do what you have all suggested: reinstall Windows and copy across all programs and data files. I have done this before so I know it takes a very long time! (Which is better than not having them at all).

I have tried using the Recovery Console and fixing my boot.ini file, but to no avail. I think it might be something to do with my security descriptors, because Norton Disk Doctor reports that there are errors ith them. But I don't know (and can't find out much) about security descriptors.

I have run checkdisk /f, which says it has corrected errors, but I got a rather odd situation where, when I rebooted, all my hardware was rediscovered and loaded by Windows - and this happened each time I restarted.

All very weird.