XP MCE Logon/Logoff problem

[Jthe7th]

I was wondering if anyone could provide some assist with a problem I'm having with my XP Media Center Edition OS (OEM). I've run into the situation (discussed in other threads) where the moment I log on, the system immediately logs me off. I can't even get into safe mode, the same logon/logoff situation. When I tried the "copy userinit.exe wsaupdater.exe" option, I got the message that the "file could not be found". I did a "dir *.exe" and userinit was no where to be found.

Next I tried a repair reinstall. The process completed and yet once again the logon/logoff happened.

Can anyone suggest any options? After doing some research online, it doesn't seem like I have many options other than to do a clean install of XP. Is there a way to do a clean install and preserve the data I currently have on my hard drive? If it will help, my current setup has only one partition and I have no third party partitiion software (not that I could access it anyway). Shame on me for not doing the periodic backup of my data.

Any assistance will be greatly appreciated.

[glc]

Pull the hard drive and slave it into another computer or put it in a USB housing to get your data off.

[Jthe7th]

Forgive my ignorance, but as slaving my HD into another computer is not an option, could you tell me what a USB housing is?

[glc]

An external hard drive housing. Actually being that your drive is SATA, here's a better bet:

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=2020&cat=HDD

You still will need another computer to copy the data onto.

[Jthe7th]

Thanks for the replies glc. I do have one additional question. Would it be possible to do a "parallel installation" without erasing my data? Here's a step by step page I found on such an installation. Seems it might work...emphasis on "might".

http://www.wikihow.com/Get-Data-from-My-Documents-Even-if-You-Can't-Load-Windows-(xp-Only)

[glc]

Yes you can - but you will wind up with quite a mess when you are done.

[Jthe7th]

Well, I did the parallel install and it at least allowed me back into the system to access my data. Now I will decide which storage avenue to take (internal or external hard drive), copy the data over to that and then do a complete reinstall. Now hopefully I won't have any problem porting the previous data from my pc games over to the new install. Lesson definitely learned about backing up.