Sometimes Windows XP begin to crash unexpectedly and you have important data. You don’t want to reinstall the entire operating system and even if you can, you just don’t have the time right now. But you need to work on your computer, because you have some unfinished jobs.

It’s right the time to use your windows XP recovery disk to restore your operating system to a previous working state.

Usually, when a windows failure is happening, excepting of course the cases when there are some hardware problems, the critical file systems from the windows directory are corrupted or missing. But you can fix this with the original XP boot installation CD. A Repair Install will replace the system files with the files on the XP CD used for the Repair Install. It will leave your applications and settings intact, but Windows updates will need to be reapplied.

So you must boot your computer from your XP installation CD. Some motherboards have a special button which let you choose the drive you want to boot from. If it’s not the case for you, you simply change the boot order from your BIOS. After you see the Welcome Screen you will see some options. The one you must choose is “To setup Windows XP now, press ENTER”. You must press Enter. Take care here : you MUST NOT CHOOSE at this current step the option “To repair a Windows XP installation using Recovery console, press R”. It’s very important.
Next, the License Agreement screen will appear. Press F8 to accept and Windows will search for any previous Windows installations. Now you must select the XP installation you want to repair from the list. Press R to start the repair.
Now you must wait the procedure to end. Setup copies all the necessary files to the hard disk and it will reboot by itself. Setup will continue as if it were a new and clean install, but your settings and applications will remain intact.

It’s very important to mention that your windows will not be patched with previous updates or service packs. You must reapply these. You can choose automatic updates, or you can manually update with windows XP service pack 3 from the internet . Some services that depend of these updates will not work but they will restart after the completion. Don’t forget to reactivate the firewall, because the settings that depend of Windows operating system itself will be as they are to a fresh installation. But your programs and applications will be there, files and documents will be untouched.