I had a Windows XP Upgrade installed on my E-machine 500is and working fine for a year or more, but the taskbar got corrupted, so that when I tried to do a System Restore at 2 different restore points, they each failed. I tried doing an upgrade re-install according to instructions on the Microsoft website and that, too, failed. Then I tried an entire re-install and chose my larger 15 Gig D: drive (slave) when it came up as a choice in the installation process, because the master C: drive was only 4 Gigs and I figured it might need more room for the process and the install process itself warned me not to install over an existing installation of XP.
The new Windows XP Installation process went through to the re-start and then, as it booted up, came to the safemode screen, saying: Registry/Configuration error, choose prompt only and run scanreg. But when I went to the prompt only, and typed scanreg, it says it cannot find scanreg.
I figured the problem might be because the install had been onto a slave drive, so I completely switched the drives, and jumpers to make the slave the master and the former master drive the slave. I also switched the power and disk drive cables. I went into CMOS and it correctly identified the new 15 Gig drive as C: and the 4 Gig drive as D:
But when the Install process went bach through to completion, re-installing on the C: drive, it started up again to come back to the same error message as above. It also says: WIN.COM not found and C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.SYS not found, C:\WINDOWS\DBLBUFF.SYS not found and C:\WINDOWS\IFSHLP.SYS not found. I can explore both drives from the command prompt and cannot find any of those files except WIN.COM and HIMEM.SYS in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\
I am not familiar with partitioning or formatting drives and which values (cylinders and the like) I need to select. I want to save a lot of downloaded files currently stored on the C: drive, which I hope I can probably XCOPY in DOS to the D: drive, I think - I haven't yet tried.
But before I did all that, is there some simpler solution, a file I can access to change incorrect settings? Why would the Windows XP boot up sequence be looking for files that it did not install?
I think I can probably get far more knowledgeable help here than on the Microsoft website.
Thanks!
