[belch175]

I was trying to open I-tunes and the system froze, I tried restarting and nothing would work not even the start bar. So, I shut the system down and then turned it back on. I got as far as the desk top loading and the system froze up again so I shut it down and turned it back on again. This time it completely froze up and went to a black screen just after the XP load screen. So after this I tried to start up in Safe Mode it began to load but each time I try to start in Safe Mode it freezes at the same point. as far as I can tell it is on a part of the hard drive that was partitioned by Dell when I bought the computer. The file that it keeps freezing at is :
partition(0)System32\Drivers\agp440.sys. I figure I need to reinstall windows but I am unsure how to. I loaded up the Dell resources disc and selected the option to repair the current installation of Windows but all it does is lead me to a dos prompt C:\WINDOWS and I have no idea what to do from here. If I select to reinstall XP on the partition it says I may lose all of files, system settings, user profiles, etc. I'm unsure what to do I don't want to loose all my recent files since my last really big update was done over a year ago. Does anyone know what I should do?

[muppy03]

have a read here http://www.informationweek.com/news/...yText=&isPrev=

[belch175]

Thanks for the suggestion, I followed the link, followed the directions, however, I'm not able to complete the steps listed on this website. I come to a point where the instructions say to select the version of windows I want to repair only my computer does not list it like they show on the website instead of showing a single version of windows like this: c:/windows>
my computer in stead shows to partitions the first one must be the mabe one as it shows hundreds of thousands of bytes, I am not sure what the second one is though as it is only 8 bytes. Regardless neither has an option R=REBUILD under it like the wesite shows, my only options are to repartition, exit, or to go to the recovery console.

I am reading up more on this website and it says there is a "rebuild" function of the recovery console but I am unsure of how to use it.

[belch175]

I was finally able to get back into Windows. First I used the repair console to install a new boot section, this allowed me to at least load Windows and get to the desktop. Unfortunateyl this did not cure my problem since the computer ran unbelievably slow once I did get to the desktop. However, I was able to run the network wizard and link it to my laptop, this let me pull all of my important files off. I believe now that I must have had some sort of nasty malware or virus because of all of the steps I had to take to get this mess cleaned up. Here is what I did to take care of the situation:

1. With the repair console I reformatted partition 1 (which still did not show to have a valid installation of Windows on it) (partition 2 was only 8mb)

2. I ran the reformat and reinstall windows option from the recovery console.

3. After these two steps I was for the first time able to load Windows and get to the desktop without any problems. The computer was up and running but something still was not quite right, every program seemed to be taking a little bit longer to run. I eventually stumled on the reason when I went in to the bios to switch from loading from the cd drive to the hard drive. In the bios I discovered the processor speed was turned from normal to automatic. I switched it back to normal and it is running 100% again .

I reinstalled Zone Alarm and Avast but this time I also added Threat Fire for a little added protection. It doesn't just look for malware and viruses based off of a definition database but by there behavior and it was free on Kim Komando's site.

Thanks for the help The information week site had a lot of usefull stuff on it and helped navigate through the repair console.