xp hangs after upgrade

[bhome83]

tried to upgrade windows xp professional. put cd into drive and went through the steps to upgrade xp. wanna upgrade becuz having problems with recycle bin and someone told me i could fix it that way. In the middle of the upgrade i got a message prompt box that said i needed to find some file (forgot the name). had no idea where to get that file so i pressed cancel and it automatically continued with the upgrade. then later it asked for some file for ATI driver and i found that on my ati driver cd and continued with the upgrade. after it was done upgrading the computer automatically restarted and the computer hanged. hanged for about a minute or two then it autmatically restarted and gave me message saying that windows has a problem. gave me option of safe mode and normal startup and previous good cofiguration where everything worked fine. picked this option but got same computer hang up. then i started in safe mode to see if i could do a system restore but forgot to create one. I tried to upgrade xp again through the cd but it said that my previous upgrade had not completed and that i needed to restart my computer for it to automatically finish. but instead computer just hangs. so now im in safe mode and don't know how to get my computer back to how it was before the upgrade. i have a feeling that when i was prompted for those two files when xp was upgrading something went wrong. anyone know how to fix this so i can get xp back to how it was? already made the big mistake of not creating a restore pt. there has to be a way though to get xp back to how it was. thanks for any help.

[Confused]

XP creates restore points automatically. Can you get to "Help and Support" while in safe mode. Click "Start", select "Help and Support". If so select "Undo changes to your computer with system restore"
Chas

[Cricket]

Hi bhome83,

Do you need to save any info that's on the hard drive or can you wipe the drive clean to start over?

If you can start over, use the hard drive maker's zero fill utility to zero out the drive, then you can start over with a fresh hard drive.

If you can't do that, then someone else with more WinXP experience will have to assist you since I'm not familiar with WinXP Pro.

Cricket

[bhome83]

confused, winxp didn't create an automatic restore point. i thought they did that too but they didn't. I have a lot of stuff on my hard drives and i really don't want to start over. so am i basically screwed? doesn't make much sense why i couldn't get it back to where it was because im in safe mode right now and everything is there all my files and everything so the upgrade didn't destroy anything.

[Confused]

Sorry Bhome. Must be the way they are set up. Mine creates one every day about 2PM. I always create one before I make any changes. I have used it countless times already.
Chas

[bhome83]

so am i basically screwed here? doesn't make much sense to me. i thought there has to be a way to get windows back to normal. any xp geniuses out there that can help me?

[Tuf]

If you boot from the CD does it give the option of using the Repair Console?

[bhome83]

what's the repair console?

[Confused]

I haven't used it, but my understanding is that it checks for missing and corrupted files and restores them from the XP CD.
Chas

[bhome83]

alright so can someone please tell me how to boot from the cd? thanks.

[bailey]

just go into the bios set-up and change the boot device from the hard drive to the cdrom drive, then when it restarts it will say to hit any key to boot from cd. have the cd in the drive when you do this