Whew! I took out the replacement second internal hard drive (and the external hard drive). Rebooted - everything booted up fine. Then I shut down. Reattached the external drive - booted up - everything's fine. So does it seem that the replacement drive from WD is bad as well? (I did not put the 2TB drive back in - but it was working fine before. Again - this drive was bought for when I get around to setting up a dual boot XP/Windows 7 drive - and until my family crisis - and multiple electronic/tech failures are resolved, I'm not going to tackle that one.) Don't know why it wouldn't boot from the original hard drive when the replacement second drive was installed. Any thoughts? since it does boot with the bad drive - although it mentions the hard drive problem and allows me to select F1 to continue. At least I'm up and running - and the main, original drive seems fine. (I have used Acronis - and did a back up and incremental over the summer. Then did a full clone in December when I thought the drive was failing. But I am still quite confused by the acronis instructions - and would like to start from scratch. Now I have a 2TB external drive and would like to make the proper kind of back up. How should I do this - as the words on some of instructions Raven often links use clone at one point but seem to be talking about a different kind of back up. One complication is that the original thread for acronis 2010 - with pics - is gone now and acronis 2011 instructions are more fleshed out). I have Acronis 2010. Thank you. Lynn.

Do you know the name of the file that is missing? Are you sure that is the only one? Did you get more than one recovery CD when you bought the computer? Perhaps there is a second CD with those needed files and you are trying the wrong CD. During start up with the CD in the drawer does the CD player activity light appear for quite a while suggesting the CD is being read? You might consider putting the CD in the computer you are using, stop the auto start as it occurs, then use Windows Explorer to verify you have the right CD. When you entered the BIOS you tried to change the sequence to CD then hard drive then floppy. Did you hit F10 to save and exit? If not then were you prompted to save the changes and did you follow along? Seems like you may have exited without saving the changes.

if it is his regular pc it is windows 2000 I do believe. Shax can you get to safe mode at all? if so you can run malwarebytes in safe mode, it sounds like it could be something from that update that did not agree with your system. I just don't know much about windows 2000. You could try to get a linux live cd and stick it in the cd drive and see if it will boot to the live cd and using it you could at least see your windows partition and save your files. Use Ubuntu Live CD to Backup Files from Your Dead Windows Computer Geek to Live: Rescue files with a boot CD oh yes you were using a registry cleaner??? hum well that could definitely cause some issues, do you happen to know if that one you used created a back up of your registry? Not that it will help very much if you can not get to boot.

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).