XP Home addition won't boot up.

My hubby installed the SP 2 and then updated Media Player to Media Player 9 then 10. All seemed fine but when he shout down it informed him there was an error in an exe. He didn't record what exe had the error.
Now the computer won't boot up. We are stumped and any help or direction would be so appreciated.

Thanks 2Pegasus

 

Hello 2Pegasus,

Can you boot in safe mode? - Hit F8 or F5 key booting up. And if you can, can you get to System Restore or Last good configuration?

Edit: Forgot: please post system specs and do you have an XP cd?

Regards - Charles

 

Hi Charlesvan, thanks for responding. The husband is sleeping now. He is working nights. I am not sure what all his computer has or is but it is a Pentium 4 and at least a 3.0 GHz, he has a good video and sound card.
He has the window's xp cd and we have been in safe mode. But we could find the restore or last good configuration. We got to a black screen that said partition available is...... would you like to install xp there, or something like that.
We hope he won't have to reformat.....

Thanks again for the help.
2Pegasus

 

Hi 2Pegasus,

The reason I asked whether you had an XP cd is to use it to boot into the installation.

In order to do that, the BIOS has to be setup to look for the cdrom as the first boot device, so make sure that's so. Different OEM's have different keys for that - mine is a Dell and it's the delete key.

Once that's set, put the XP cd in the drive, you'll get a menu, one of which is to repair by using the Recovery Console. Pressing R will at that point allow you to boot into the installation. Not sure of the exact wording because I'm dual booting and I get asked which installation I want to boot into. That should allow you to boot into the OS and see what happened.

Regards - Charles