You have to be able to boot into windows to use system restore. It's never actually worked for me, even when I was able to boot up and try it. It can also really slow down your pc as it writes restore points at seemingly random intervals, and will do everything on your hdd (requiring vast amounts of storage), unless you deliberately exclude partitions.
I've had better luck using the backup utility, it will even restore from another installation, as long as you point it at the right partition(s). Furthermore you can select which individual files to restore, if you know exactly where the problem is. Best thing is to make a backup right after a clean install, again after installing drivers, and again after main apps (keeping each backup on optical media).
It is way faster than having to go back and do a clean install.
What Dave!! said basically. I've fixed so many XP installations with a Repair Installation.
In this case he might not have another PC to stick the drive into meaning that option wouldn't be possible.
>Chkdsk is also unlikely to turn a none-booting Windows installation into a booting installation. It may fix a bad sector, but it won't recover the file which was sitting there.
You've heard of journallng?
Right, I'd better actually try to fix this instead of just pretending it doesn't exist...
I might/should be able to get hold of an XP CD and boot from that. I /think/ that both my borked install and the disc are XP Home but if they're not, what will happen? Will an XP Home disc repair an installed XP Pro?
>I'm currently at about 1GB free so space will need to be made no matter what, just wondering how much I should budget for.
I'm thinking you might be borked right there, and you may as well salvage whatever data and do a clean reinstall. On a bigger disk. For xp pro I'd budget minimum 10G, and maybe 20-30G if you're putting all your apps, games etc on there as well.