My dad's pulled the power cord out the back last night and as the battery is long since dead, it shut down. Trouble is it won't restart - it gets as far as the xp logo then restarts, says it had a problem and how would I like to boot (safe mode, normal etc). All options start this loop again.

I have the xp disc but thats all. I don't want to reinstall cos he'll lose little programs, bookmarks etc. Not a huge deal but just annoying.

Any ideas if its a simple fix? I can access the repair console from the disc. I was also wondering if its possible to reinstall xp over an existing one and just install missing or damaged files?

Trying last known good configuration doesn't work? You should be able to just reinstall over the top of the existing XP install.

Last known good configuration won't work either.

When I try to reinstall over the existing one it only gives me formating options saying that there is not enough room on the partition (or that it may be too corrupt).

Hmm. You can try booting off the install CD and using the recovery console to poke around but it is quite limited in what you can fix.

Do you have a way of yanking the drive and plugging it into another PC?

Got this working. Got into the recovery console and ran "chkdsk /r" and it checked and fixed the disk for a LONG time. It now boots but will see if the problem has gone for good.

You should still back up anything important as system files might have been corrupted. chkdsk just makes sure that the metadata is correct. It doesn't know what should be in a file.