Forget about the XP upgrade PERIOD
If your system isn't booting this is the last thing you should be doing.
Once you've corrected the booting problem and you've run the XP Upgrade
Advisor then perhaps you should consider upgrading to XP but not before.

And then if this doesn't work, I'll use
scanreg /restore to get back to where I was just yesterday

Scanreg offers no such escape route OR are you saying that when running
scanreg /restore you can see a backed up copy of the registry from
yesterday and then no others except for four (a total of five should be
visible) from "years ago"? If so that is indeed very strange and begs the
question as to why the registry started being backed up yesterday having
not been so for a year or more.

Data backup. If you can only boot to DOS using a boot floppy then this is
probably easiest done using an external USB drive which should I think be
available provided you enable USB Legacy Support in the PC's bios.
--
Mike Maltby




JNB wrote:

Thanks guys for the suggestions....so I guess my approach will be to
use the scanreg /restore to get back to a very old registry, assuming
Me boots then I'll use Sytem Restore and hopefully there is a much
more recent checkpoint available. Before this though, will it be
possible to backup my data files and other downloaded executables
(esp updates) to CD? How? And then if this doesn't work, I'll use
scanreg /restore to get back to where I was just yesterday and try
the XP upgrade. Please comment one last time.