[HKMk23]

Boot to an XP disk (SP2 or later), fire up the Recovery Console, hit the "R" option, and it should fire off the "Restore" process.

Yeah...I knew about that...

What I was thinking of was a process for tricking XP into "Recovering" an XP install that it might normally regard as being beyond recovery.

I'll just have to do more digging, then let you know what it was.

[Dead Corpse]

There’s a switch to make the registry think that setup hasn’t run yet. That’s about the closest I can think of.