I think you're wasting your time burning dvds. They're physically unstable, slow, bulky, and prone to failure when inserted into a drive. I just took a quick look on New Egg. A 128 gig Patriot thumb drive (a decent brand) is $48. You can have your pick of 500 gig USB drives (Toshiba, Seagate or WD) for under $60. Get one of one, one of the other, and know that you have plenty of capacity and security for many years into the future. You want another free backup copy? Maybe you've already done this, but if you have more than one PC in the house, put a copy of your stuff on the other one's hard drive. Most people have unused space on their hard drives. Edit to add PS: If you want to join the ranks of the backup paranoid (like me), never have more than one back up copy plugged in or actively being used at the same time. One power surge could take out all copies of the entire collection. Where I live, we almost never have lightning and few real power surges. Still, I don't take any chances. This post was edited by snidely on Fri, Feb 14, 14 at 20:30

My goodness gracious, this really isn't that complicated. If you suspected a bad drive, what you should have done is determined the manufacturer of the drive and downloaded the manufacturers diagnostic utility. If it reported errors, replace the drive (perhaps under warranty) if not, look elsewhere for the source of trouble. As it appears you replaced the original drive, the new drive is blank and has no operating system hence the error message. You have four choices: Reinstall the original drive and run the appropriate diagnostic utility to see if the drive is actually failing. Leave the new drive in place and reinstall the operating system via the supplied recovery disc which will return the computer as it was when you first opened the box. Once that's up and running, get all the Windows updates and install any software you'd like to use. Of course, you'll loose any data on the old drive. You do not need to download any drivers first unless you've made big hardware changes to the computer. "Big" changes would most likely be video or sound cards. Use the original drive to make a clone (exact copy) of the drive contents on the new drive. Every drive manufacturer includes the necessary software and instructions in the package or makes it available as a free download from their website. While this method will preserve your son's data, if the problem wasn't the drive but rather, say, some corruption in Windows, those problems will continue. Leave the new drive in place and reinstall the old drive. Run the recovery disc, installing Windows to the new drive. As described above, get Windows updates and reinstall any software. Selectively copy data files from the old drive to the new drive. If the diagnostic software indicates impending failure, do this part quickly. Let us know how you want to proceed and if you need additional instructions.

Your post reminds me how out of touch I have become with this kind of problem (and I am just posting about a possible win install too). However like you, I remember some things from my past and I suspect that your problem is probably a simple fix. At least for the time being, I think reinstalling windows is extreme and since you have a second working computer you should wait for some of these other clever folks to help. I'll bet there is some utility to help with this but if not, there must be a way to mnually link particular extensions to specific programs, and for the time being you would probably only need to make a couple of links (but don't ask me how).

why don't you just install a distro of linux on it and just use that? running by live cd is fine but it will run very very slow because it is only using the resources of the cd drive. Try one of the live cds in it if it runs good and looks good then go ahead and install it you can always just wipe it off and do something else later. My main pc runs Mepis linux, that is what I am using right now. You have very little to worry about running linux concerning infection.