Originally Posted by pgh13  You're right of course. This all started as AOL won't work via modem - and no AV software. |
The usual story with people who are still connected via dialup.
I dont know how many times I've ended up doing a "favour" that had me pulling my hair out and took way longer than I had anticipated.
When it gets to the stage you seem to be at, I usually say F it and do a clean install after recovering any data I can. If anything is lost, blame them for not having any AV.
A good option for recovering the "irreplacable photographs" and whatever else is to use a live linux cd. Boot from the CD, attach a removable drive and copy everything to the drive (or a network location) before the clean install. Backtrack is a good distro for this.
The problem you are running into with the free disk space not being recognised is a strange one. Not one I've come across.
This is not something I haven't done since the days of Win 98, but you could remove the drive, install it in another PC and try to recover from there, I'm not even sure that will work with Win XP. It'll probably throw a wobbly because of the different hardware.
Do those machines have a recovery partition? If so at least you will avoid all the headaches of installing drivers after your clean install. (If thats what you decide to do).
Good luck, those thank you jobs are great fun
You'll be lucky to get a bottle of plonk or a six pack for your efforts.
