k...my computer is like fooked to crap...

One day it was all good, I put it to sleep or hibernate or what ever.... then in the morning I woke up turned it on...and I got really messed up looking picture on my screen.... like everything was all random colours, and there was lines going across my screen about 20 pixels thick with random pixeled colours in it..and some of the windows buttons were missing....I thought my video card was fucked or something, or maybe I just had to restart....so i restarted it, then i got passed the bios setup and right after that before the windows loading screen it said... something like(dont remember:  "NTRDL missing press ctrl alt delete to restate"

I restarted like 10 times and nothing happened so I reinstaled windows the next day, but it didn't exactly get rid of the old windows or computer files... it was like it made a different partition but no other partitions show up on the screen

, when I reinstalled windows I made the install path as WINDOWS1, cause i didnt wanna delete everything else, I was hopeing my old windows would like redirect itself to the newer one or something smart.... so now im running on a clean windows, as if no files are anywhere, nothing in the start menu, but i can still see ALL of my old files in my hardisk under my computer....I'm like wtf....I wanna be able to have my old setup back.
I think it was a virus but im not forsure...
Please someone help....

Its going to be really hard to get your old stuff back since you would need to copy the registry from the old system to the new one. I'm not sure how to do this. For now tho you should be able to move your pictures, music ect. (no programs) to the new system with out any problem. I'd start installing from CD since I don't think if it is even possible to get the programs from the old system back.

I was thinking maybe it's in the boot manager....

I can open up my old programs, still.  but, I don't wanna go through tweaking everything to the way I had it, it took too long.

i found a while ago that there is a file in your Documents and Settings/User folder called NTUSER.DAT  i think if you copy that over into the new thingo, i think it will have all your settings and stuff back... i cant promise though

The lines sound like a video card problem.

ntldr is the Windows boot loader. Reinstalling Windows should fix it.

Boot from the Windows XP setup disk, and choose to repair/recover an existing installation. At the first screen, choose 'Setup Windows XP' not 'Repair an existing installation with recivery console. Somewhere in the next menus it should give you an option to do it.

Note; the wording of things might be slightly different, I am authoring this from memory, and haven't checked.

I didn't do repair because it asks which installation or something in like a command prompt looking thing and i i dont know, im pretty sure its a number.......

I thought it was the drive letter. Just try typing 1 or c and see what happens. After that it will be mostly automated, and any input it asks you for will be in a gui so it's easy.

alright...I'll try that...... may take awhile for a response

Now that you have two windows' installed, you can probably just start up to the old one (open boot.ini, change partition(0)\WINDOWS1 to partition(0)\WINDOWS) but I cant promise you this will work (i recomend having two entries there incase it doesnt) since all the problem was was that one file.

yes, thanks but....how do i edit boot.ini?

quote:

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Start > Run > CMD

attrib -s -h -r c:\boot.ini

attrib +s c:\boot.ini

notepad c:\boot.ini

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alright! thanks.... may take awhile for a response, im busy right now.

Sorry for double post, but it's just to bump my success, and thanks to ShawnZ very much for teh help.

if you manage to start to your old windows fine, you may as well delete the new install (c:\windows) and rename the old one (windows.bak) back to "Windows"

then, just change boot.ini accordingly

Too much effort...no need to anyways, i'll use the other one to test out dodgy programs...