DTowleJr

I'm repairing a friends HP Pavilion a810e system with XP Home. He said that he accidentally hit F11 (Recovery) and his computer doesn't work now. I couldn't get any hardware to be recognized by the system, and since his recovery disks were burned on 2 DVDs, there was no way of getting the OS to read from the Recovery Disks. So I tried to install my XP Pro Upgrade onto the machine. I had to flip flop my 2 burned copies in order to get all the files installed, what would fail on one copy would work when I continued the process with the other copy. Then the system rebooted to continue the install. Therein lies the problem that I am having. The system has finished the first 3 of 5 parts and is now trying to install Windows XP. It starts to read the CD, then gets a failure popup with the following lines: Error: Installation failed: J:\I386\asms. Error message: Error performing inpage operation. Error: SXS.DLL: Syntax error in manifest or policy file "J:\I386\asms\1000\MSFT\WINDOWS\GDIPLUS\GDIPLUS.MAN" on line 4. And it continues several more times to relook at the CD before aborting. I have tried both CDs with the same result and am at a loss on how to continue. How can I get past this and finish the installation?

I received my friend's computer after the message "This program failed to start because umpnpmgr.dll was not found. Reinstalling the program may fix this problem." So I set up the computer in my shop, and I powered it up. At first, I had three ‘failures to find the OS’ messages. Eventually, I was able to get the machine to boot up. It would show the startup screen and then go to the OS choices menu. Each option that I would choose failed. Start Windows Normally sits and spins on the startup screen, then goes to a blue screen that says "c0000218 {Registry File Failure} The Registry cannot load the hive (file): \Systemroot\System32\Config\SYSTEM or its log or alternative. It is corrupt, absent, or not writable." Then it dumps the physical memory, and reboots the machine. Safe Mode, Safe Mode with Networking, and Last Known Good Configuration just goes to the blue screen but does not begin the memory dump and a shutdown is all that I can do to get out of the problem. One other forum I Googled said to disable ACPI in the BIOS. When I disable the ACPI in BIOS: Start Windows Normally, Safe Mode, and Safe Mode with Network just loops back to a reboot. Last Known Good Configuration does the same. I have two general questions: 1 - What started this downward spiral? 2 - How do I remedy the situation without completely starting over from scratch? Also - Can I get to a DOS prompt, and if I can, can I get to a System Restore point and get the machine back to a good registry? I set up this machine with a new hard drive after the first one failed. I had used the Acer (the manufacturer) OEM setup disks. Then I installed various other programs. I ran several restoration points along the way as well as cleaning and backing up the registry at those same points. Spybot, Ad-Aware, and AVG Antivir are installed.