Buy a new drive, they are cheap, use the original C drive as the second drive to save your files, do a clean install on the new drive. If you already have two drives take out the C drive and install a new drive in it’s place ... move files back and forth until you have them all recovered.
Yep, it’s a huge pain, but the road you are on smells like doom.
I am doing this now ... Windows XP sucks ... but I must use it for other reasons.
I thought XP was fine, apart from some bug issues with IE 6. It was VISTA I wanted to avoid installing; I heard it was really buggy. I guess, judging from the comments so far, that I’ll buy a regular XP package, some CD-r’s (the computer has a CD writer, thank G*d), and another 512-mb RAM card to replace the 2 64s. Then I’ll reformat the hard (C:) drive and hope that the computer will restart so that I can install XP from scratch.
I’m still willing to accept other comments that would lead me to some way I could do things WITHOUT starting all over, so to speak.
See post #12. That is the correct solution to get out of the mess. Otherwise figure out a way to back up the files you want to keep then format the hard drive and install XP fresh.
I’m afraid you are setting yourself up for a life of pain if you try to run XP on a 667 mhz processor. If you have Win2K available it runs reasonably well on that class of processor and would be a better choice.