Not sure whether this is the right forum, but as Ghost experts you guys may know how to solve the problem. This will be a long writing (and reading), but it's the only way to give you the right picture of the problem. I have a XP who has decided to pass away last week. I must resurrect it EXACTLY AS IT WAS at the time it died, and the "REPAIR" from the installation CD isn't an option (I've already tried it, and the results aren't quite good). My PC actually has 2 machines living inside the case. Each one starts from its own HD and both are running XP Pro SP2 OS. XP installation 1 - I'll call it "XP-Daily" - is the most used. Its purpose is daily usage such Internet, VoIP (Skype), office usage (I work from home), downloads and all sort of needs one would have from a PC. XP installation 2 - say "XP-Video" - is only used for video and photo editing, DVD editing and authoring. I don't know if I should provide the hardware specs. If so, please let me know. One month ago I cloned the whole HD1 where "XP-Daily" is (primary and all logical partitions) into a spare HD. Recovering from this clone isn't a good path as well, due I'd be loosing all changes made over last weeeks on the system. Last week I was downloading a plug in from Shutterfly ( ShutterflyPluginInstall.exe at www.shutterfly.com/downloads/install_pl.jsp?pl=win_nn&d=1) and had it installed into "XP-Daily" in order to be able to upload photos in bulk. Once installation was completed I switched the PC off and moved to "XP-Video" to edit some photos. After a while I stopped for dinner and left the PC idling for almost 1 hour. Returning to desk it was just in time to notice the PC was re-starting itself while, watching the screen and wondering the reason for that, I saw CHKDSK running at start up and making lots of changes on the disks. Some files being changed were boot.ini and autoexec.bat, and messages were sort of some kind of invalid cross reference (not sure very well as I had no time to write down any of it). But I do remember there were a lot of invalid files found by CHKDSK and its final message was that CHKDSK had made changes to the system's files. After that, the "XP-Daily" stopped booting, at a black screen with message : File BOOT.INI is invalid Starting from C:\Windows\ Here is worth to mention the "other" "XP-Video" was fully functional and by booting from it I have access to the whole HD where the damaged "XP-Daily" is installed, including the primary partition. Then, from "XP-Video", I created a BOOT.INI file at C:\Windows\ in "XP-Daily". This got thru the black screen just to stop at a BLUE screen with the message : STOP : c0000135 Unable to locate components. This application could not be started due KERNEL32.dll is missing. Re-installing the application may fix the problem. I went back to XP-Video and copied KERNEL32.dll at C:\Windows\ in "XP-Daily". This just changed the message on the blue screen to say this time it was WINSRV the missing one. At this point, once again back to "XP-Video", I renamed SYTEM32 folder and copied it all from the cloned disk. This worked and got thru the BSOD, but now it is stopping at XP blue screen that is similar to the Welcome screen (where the user accounts should be, with darker blue stripes at the top and bottom of the screen, and a light blue in the middle, with XP logo in the middle of the screen), but there is no user account to start from and the XP won't go further. Neither mouse or keyboard works, nothing happens, and the only option is switching it off on the Power button. The problem is that a lot of things has happened during September, lots of changes has been made to the system settings, files has been edited, added, etc, so just restoring the 1 month old cloned HD won't get me to where I need. I reckon there is a good chance to fix "XP-Daily", by using the proper files that only care about the start-up process, without loosing all the personal settings already done over the OS during last months. I JUST DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO THIS - actually, I'M NOT SURE if this is possible. What I would like to know is if there is someone out there who knows how to retrieve from the clone copy only the system's files to make the dead "XP-Daily" to start again. My hope is that it would be possible repairing the damaged XP by using the right system's files from the clone instead using it totally ( what would then make me loose all settings change and application updates I've made over the last month). Thank you for reading up to here, and lots of thanks for those who can point me the right path to follow.