for some reason it did not load windows all the way?
found out when i reset it that it said no active partition.
5 hours later of trying to get in through the install cd repair feature.
(forgot most the dos commands now
)i finally got it to show me the dir of all the hard drives one at a time.
when i looked at them all it was all messed up? it was calling them different
drive letters for the files i know was on that drive letter.
i then realized it was missing one hd. the C drive so it reverted back to the old
boot log set up from like 8 years ago?
thought i got rid of all those but glad it was there so it would find the cdrom drive. 
wait a minute 8 years ago it was the win98 op system??
oh well i got the info i needed but i never was able to get the file the screen was telling me it was not found. to be copied from the cd?
i thought just get out of the repair. reboot and have the usb flash back up drive in
and hope it finds the usb drive because it had the file on it.
well i got lucky after 7 hours of doing all the above it finally loaded windows
but was it loaded from the flash drive or did it just use the ntoskernl.exe from the flash drive?? 
well i went to the back up drive in the system and ran the windows back up file i have there it was made before the mess up so if it was to work that should fix it.
after i ran the restore i then decided that since it was finding the back up drive as the c drive when it messed up i'd just copy the folder for all the system from the flash usb drive to the drive in the tower so when or if it lost the file again it would find it on the back up in the system and not make me panic again
that took about 3 hours.
so i thought just in case i'd better do a new back up on the flash so i don't lose any of the files added after the last back up to it. that took another 4 hours. so by this time i'm tired but got to hear music in the evening again. so its working not sure why it picked the last day of the year to mess up but it did.
no it was not a hacker's trojan unless it was planted in there 2 yrs ago cause its been a stand alone for that long now.
ah the life of a untrained self taught computer geek, it never gets boring.
Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:5517, old post ID:40170