I just joined the forum TODAY and apologize if this subject has been covered, but I couldn't find what I needed after searching several times...

I have an HP Pavilion dv9000 laptop with Windows XP Media Center addition.  In the 3.5 years that I have owned it, I have done a system recovery to an earlier date several times with good results.  A couple of days ago I started getting lots of unauthorized pop-up windows so I decided to do a system recovery to a date a few weeks ago when things were working fine.  It seemed to have completed the recovery fine (took about 30 minutes), but when the computer restarted, it wouldn't boot up.  It seemed to be stuck in an endless loop on the Windows XP screen; the screen wasn't frozen because the LITTLE bars were moving across the screen the whole time.  I finally shut the computer down after 3 hours of this.  I have turned it back on 3 other times for about an hour but it just gets to that screen and stays there.

Is there anything I can try?  Thanks for any help... I'm pretty green when it comes to this sort of thing.Tap F8 repeatedly at boot which should bring you into safemode...see if it works there.
If not re-boot doing the same thing and choose "Last known good configuration...I tried safemode and it went to a screen filled with lines starting with:  multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS\system32\drivers....  and froze there.

I tried "Last known good configuration..."  and it stayed on the Windows XP screen with the bars moving like before.

Any other ideas? Repair Install of XP

I suggest reading it thru and printing out a reference copy before starting...

Best of Luck.Looks pretty technical and involved for someone like me..., but I'll give it a try.

Although I'd like to keep my data, there is NOTHING that I'm super concerned about losing.  Is there an easy way to wipe out everything and start over?  I never did create any recovery disks, which I just read that I should have 

P.S.  I just tried f11 on start up and it LET me get to the PC recovery mode which says that I won't lose any date files, but will have to reinstall any applications that I put on, which is fine.  Hopefully this will get me somewhere.

Hey, thanks for all the hard work you guys/gals put in to make this such an excellent site!!  What a resource  for idiots like me to have!!  I'm glad I found it.


You are far from an idiot...and i wish you the Best of Luck.

Let us know...