Sooner or later no matter what operating system you are using, you will have to completely wipe your data and start over. With past operating systems, it usually meant you either needed the supplied restore disk or you had to have a supplied restore partition on the computer and you had to hope and pray it would work. With Windows XP, you could do a repair install that kept all your settings, programs and documents if you had the original Windows XP operating system disc that came with the computer.