I have recently had a problem with my desktop rebooting. I can't get into F8
options for safe mode, so I popped in bootable copy of my original XP CD
(sp1) with SP2 slipstreamed in. Machine already had SP2 updates installed.
Machine had Avast antivirus, and regularly ran ad-aware. I had recently
installed spybot prior to problems.

Now, machine goes to bsod quickly at boot and then restarts.

I saw the MS article 307545 on going into recovery console and temporarily
replacing the five system32/config files from the repair directory in order
to boot. However, I tried this after I had tried the auto repair option from
the install menu of the XP CD. The repair didn't work, still reboots
continually. And when I tried to repair again, setup said it had already
"upgraded to Windows XP", but it would try again. What I didn't realize is
that this process would delete the restore points in the system volume
information folder. (Clearly a novice.) So, when I started XP with the
replacement config files from the repair directory, the only restore point
folder was the one created when I created the new config files. So, I
couldn't roll Windows back. Bummer.

But, at least I was able to see all my files, in particular, a lot of emails
in Outlook that I need to save.

In any event, I was curious to see if there was some other to fix the boot
problem from the Recovery console. I've restored the original five boot
files from the temp directory I had copied them to, and my machine is back to
the old reboot loop.

Is there a way to diagnose and possibly boot into Windows with current
config files? Or should I replace config files with repair files, backup
hdd, and then nuke the whole thing and clean install? I do not have a backup
of files. Bad hygiene, I know. If I use a program like bootitng for
creating an image file of hdd, will that be sufficient to restore files
later? I had heard that to save outlook emails, I need to be able to open
outlook and export to a file that can be imported to another machine later.
I do want to migrate my emails out of this unstable machine and into my
laptop.

So, any feedback on the above would be appreciated.

Regards,
Martin
Bellevue, WA