Service Pack???? More like Service Crap!!!!!

Good thing I have a PC at work and that I enjoy getting up early to start my day. I made a wonderful attempt on Friday of instlling XP Service Pack 2 on the home PC. I connected from work and had begun the installation as I was leaving work Friday night so that I could spend some time that evening getting it completed. It was a beautiful site to walk into the house and see the wonderful message displayed for me:

....the following file is missing or corrupt: \windows\system32\config\system


Ahhh....excellent. This was just how I wanted to spend my 3-day weekend. Normally, something like this would occur and I would just scrap the whole thing. Format, and be done. This one is a little more delicate because I have quite a few pictures that I need to copy to CD's yet. I spent some time trying to at least get the system to boot up so that I could roll-back the SP2 installation in the hopes that this would help me recover. No luck, that sucker wasn't gonna boot. So I went with the old reliable option of running the WinXP installation and allowing it to recognize my existing installation and then just have it repair it. Sounded like a brilliant idea, until l I couldn't locate my CD key. My CD is geneuine, but for the life of me I couldn't find the key. So hear I am, at work on Tuesday morning, my heard hurts for working on this all weekend and hearing my wife ask "when do you think it will be fixed?". I made numerous trips over to my dads house to use his PC to check CD's that I was using for storing information in the hopes that I had created a read-me file or something. He tried to help me out by making sure that I had tried some other things first. Asking me if I rebooted, did I make sure all the wires were connected, etc.... I laugh, because I obviously trained him well ;)

So the day will be spent searching for a CD Key here at work in the hopes that we can get this resolved this evening.

Once we are back up - I will be sharing the details of our trip to the State Fair. I still feel full from all the food we ate.