XP will not boot anymore

[Leigh Weems]

I recently tried to downgrade a new PC from Vista Home Premium to XP Pro but
kept getting bluescreened after the XP CD would load the drivers. Tried 2
different CD's including one that had never been opened, and still had the
same results. I took the drive out (~600GB) and slaved it to another working
computer running XP Pro. I booted to my XP CD, selected the 600GB drive and
told it to do a quick format of the drive. All was going well until the
first reboot and it bluescreened again with a different error. I had decided
to return the computer and purchase another that had the XP Downgrade option
instead, so I tried to boot to the older computer so I could reghost the new
drive back to the factory setup, but I now get an error (forgive me I'm not
in front of the computer) that says something to the lines of an invalid boot
path. These drives are SATA drives if that matters. I tried booting to my
XP CD again to repair the installation but now setup doesn't recognize that
XP is loaded on that drive.

Is there another way I can try to recover the drive? I am going to slave
the drive to my laptop and make sure the Data is still intact, and I guess I
am going to have to format the drive and start back over from scratch. Or
can I go back through the setup of XP and instead of loading to C:\Windows
can I load to C:\Windows-new\ ?

 

[John John (MVP)]

Stick the drive back in the new computer where it came from and use the
Vista recovery disks or the restore partition to return it to factory
conditions. Based on what you say in your post you may have destroyed
the recovery partition in which case you may be up the creek!

John

 

[Leigh Weems]

I am not worried about the Vista drive, I created a ghost image of that drive
before I tried to install XP. I am trying to get the old drive to boot back
to XP. I was able to connect it to my laptop via a USB Drive Mate and
salvage the data, but I would like to get the old drive back functional
without having to reload and resetup everything.

 

[Leigh Weems]

EDIT: When I open C:\Windows\System folder there is nothing in there. I'm
thinking more and more I will have to reload the drive :\ ...