Problem trying to install XP

[trapt]

I got hit with a bunch of spyware and trojans last week. Have done all kinds of stuff to try and remove it/them with limited sucess. Thought I would put my XP disc in last night to see if Windows could repair itself and that's when my problems started. It asked me if I wanted to upgrade Windows and I said yes. It then went through a bunch of steps and finally finished the preparing installation step. It then moved on to "installing windows" and got frozen. A screen popped up saying "fatal error" and below said "Manifest Parse Error: An invalid character was found in text content". I hit ok to view the error and the screen said "SXS.DLL: Syntax error in manifest or policy file "F:/ 1386/asms/600/MSFT/windows/common/controls.man" on line 0"

The computer restarted itself and the same message popped up again. Finally we tried putting in our backup copy of Windows (burned another copy of the disc in case anything happened to our first copy) and it took us to a screen that said "to boot from a CD hit any key". We hit any key and followed the steps to re-install windows from the disc. It went through all the steps and then said that it had to restart the computer to finish it. We crossed our fingers hoping that everything was ok, but when it restarted it took us back to the 1/2 completed installation from before.

We tried doing the boot from CD again and this time tried to do a recovery from a backup disc. Put our system backup in the A: along with the CD and it went through all the steps, said it was going to restart and then took us to the 1/2 completed installation screen again as well. Tried to fix using the recovery console, but it says we need an adminstrative password to do this and we don't know what that is.

Finally tried starting it in safe mode and chose last good configuration to see if it would work. Got the following message "windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: /system32/ntosk.rnl.exe.

Was wondering if anyone had any advice on what we could do to get our system up and running again. Is there anything we can do to get out of the screen that the computer keeps going back to everytime it restarts?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks so much.

[rspassey]

Do you need to keep the data on your disk? Or can you reformat and partiton all over again and do a fresh install, not an upgrade or repair install, but you will lose all your data that way.

[Panama Red]

Pull your hard drive and install it in another computer as the slave (or jumper both drives to Cable Select - cs). Copy the files/favorites you want to keep. Reformat the hard drive using Disk Managment from the other pc (needs to be running XP Home/Pro or Windows 2000). Put the hard drive back in the first pc and do a fresh install of XP.

[doubledragon5]

It is better to do a clean install, that why your sure to get rid of the problems you now having. In the futrue run ad-aware, spybot at least weekly to get rid of any spyware that might have gotten into your system.. I would also recommend clearing you history and cookies and clean you cache daily....

[trapt]

Thanks so much for the responses so far. Don't care if I lose the data on the hard drive. Would rather keep it (if possible), but if I can't no big deal.

How would I go about doing a fresh install? Tried to just reload everything last night, but it kept on taking me back to the screen with the 1/2 installed program. Is there a way to completely wipe the hard drive and just start over?

Thanks again!

Shawn

[freakitchen]

You can wipe your hard drive at the same time as you install your Operating System. Set your optical drive as the first boot device in bios, then the system will boot from your OS CD instead of the Hard drive.

You can then choose to delete your partitions, create a new one (or more) and install your OS.

Freakitchen