Resolved Win XP total failure?

Hello everyone!
I will go straight to my problem... I tried everything I could think of so I hope to find help here... Some months ago I bought an Acer One with Win XP SP3 pre-installed.

Shortly after I had already messed things up a little... I installed Linux Ubuntu as multiboot. So far so good, but when i removed Linux I had a real hard time with the Grub loader... But I managed to get Win XP to boot and load properly. Just I didn't notice that the scond partition (with the system restore) was hidden and no longer bootable.

I don't know if the new problem is somehow related to that previous one, but i decided to post the full picture of the situation.
I installed Avast antivirus, and the last time I was able to use the computer, it kept on notifying me of a Virus (if i remember correctly) in documents/temp/svchost.exe and random other files .tmp in the same folder. I kept on allowing the antivirus to delete them, but they would come back up in a few minutes.
That was the last time i shut down the PC. Since then, it never started again. It will not start normally, not in safe mode or any of the given options. I get the Win XP logo for a few seconds and a blue screen flashes for much less then a second and the system reboots. I tried to make a bootable USB drive using win2flash but the result is the same... If I chose "GUI mode setup" i get an error about hal.dll. There is a specific option to select in case of that error, but then I get I/O error multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\BOOTSECT.DOS.
Other option is Text mode setup from which i get a blue screen suggestint to run checkdish /F (USB drive).

The second partition still containing everything needed to restore the system will not boot and is not listed in the BIOS as a bootable device.

Any idea??? Does it exist any partition manager or disk diagnostic software that can be bootable from usb? As you surely know Acer One has no optic drive so... I am kind of out of options...



Thank you all for the help!

 

I think I found a solution... Maybe an unorthodox approach but...
I downloaded and mounted Linux Easy Peasy on a flash drive. Run the OS live from the USB drive and used its partition manager to flag as "bootable" the recovery partition from Acer.
Rebooted the system and now... I am in the system restore console.
I thought I would post this... not sure, like i said, if it is the right way to go about it, but it worked for me... might help someone else.

The system recovery has finished, system has re-installed and running smoothly. Leaving me with a new problem. Acer eRecovery system says it will save every personal data and files related to each account in the folder c:\backup
I find the folder, but i can not access the subfolder related to my account. It simply says "access denied ". Any help please?
Thanks

 

Thank you!
that solved it!