Heck, that was hard...

I've just bust a mate's PC. Now that in itself was a really stupid thing to do - and this is how I did it (very briefly...).
  1. Try and speed up disk access by loading the correct IDE driver.
  2. Doesn't work, so remove the disk in Device Manager (Don't worry, it'll find it again when you re-boot. Oh no it doesn't).
  3. Reboot and get missing "ntldr, you're fucked, ha ha ha".
  4. Reload Windows from the install disk and repair the installation.
  5. "Please enter the Windows Product Key?" - Ah, bollocks. Now I'm really shagged 'cos the PC won't boot now either except into "Setup Windows, please enter key" mode.
  6. Ask mate, "Have you got the Windows XP Disk or COA?", No?, bollocks, again.
(Briefly what happened is that the PC bust after a power fail and he sent it away. They returned a nice new PC but crucially forgot to transfer the COA onto the new PC. He later showed me the unopened license pack with no COA - so a genuine non-pirated copy.)

Eventually, I found some excellent freeware (Magic Jelly Bean Key Finder) that reads the Windows Product Key from the registry (or somewhere). After much swapping of HD's to and fro between PC's I got the key and tried reinstalling.

I got the dreaded "cant' load migregdb.ex_" and a whole host of other files too - at least 20. Eventually I found someone who suggested that it might be mismatched RAM modules. Yup, sure enough he had 256 + 512 sticks. I removed one and tried again. I still got a failure but it was enough to do a complete repair.

(insert smiley face here)

This took 4 evenings and a very nearly failed marriage...

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