Recovering XP when cd and usb drivers are corrupted....?

Question

My fathers PC suffered an (OS not found) error along time ago and I'm sorta the tech guy outta the family so i did my best to fix it without any luck. Now, about a year later, i ran across the idea of booting an entire OS from usb. Here is the situation... When booting, the Compaq logo still appears on screen, then an error somewhere around "OS not detected" appears. The Virus rendered the CD drive useless so i cant do a restore. The USB drives however are tricky.. The keyboard is connected to the pc via USB and the computer detects when it is not connected with a warning (check keyboard), when i place a usb thumb drive (tried two) they are not detected and the LED's dont even light..? I am left with 1.boot from CD 2.Boot from Floppy 3.Boot From HD

If anyone has so much as an idea i'd be glad to hear it.

Thanks Ya Guys!

Answer 1

http://www.webtree.ca/windowsxp/repair_x...

Answer 2

heres a better idea, buy a new hard drive and replace the old one and install your OS on it OR go to those pc repair places and take your hard drive there and make a proffesional reinstall the hard drive, and its not expensive pretty cheap actually its like 20-50 bucks depending on what store you go to

Answer 3

As a last resort...

1) Boot using ERD commander or similar (Something to get you access to the NTFS filesystem to rename some directories)

2) Rename the "Documents and Settings" , "Windows" and "Program Files" directories

3) Re-install windows

4) Re-install the applications

5) Copy the old settings and such from the old applications directories back to the newly installed directories.

GL! :)

Answer 4

right when you see the compaq logo press ctrl-f11 or just f11...i have no idea but that will manually boot system restore.