(Adapting Hawkmoon's thread title Grrrrr . . . Avast) I'm no PC guru, but maybe someone on this forum can advise what to do besides using detcord . . .
One of my PCs is an old Dell still running Windows XP Media Edition - it's a little long in the tooth, but still runs a few programs I find useful. Has 2 hard drives in a redundant RAID configuration.
My AVG antivirus and tuneup program prompted me to do a full disk scan so I did . . .
big mistake. Apparently some of AVG's scanning process involves running ckhdsk, and the PC went into an endless loop: chkdsk - reboot - chkdsk - reboot - chkdsk - reboot etc. (Seems XP is prone to this.) Tried MANY solutions I found on line, and ended up installing a copy of Windows XP Pro from the disk my PC shipped with.
Success - sort of.
I can now boot either copy of Windows into its most basic form - desktop is empty, and it's clearly not using the nvidia drivers to give me a full 1920x1080. Looking at the disk contents, it appears that all my files and folders are still there. Updates I've done to apps and OS over the past 13 or so years - who knows?
So - is there an easy way to bring my PC back to previous configuration, or am I better off just going through the HD and picking off whatever files and data I want to save for transfer to my next PC?