HP Pavilion a300n
2.6 GHz Intel Celeron
256 MB RAM
40 GB UDMA HD
Onboard sound and video
Windows XP Home edition

A friend brought over his machine that will not boot anymore. I don't have a XP Home CD and he can't find the HP one that came with the computer.

I've tried running the Recovery console from a XP Pro CD, when it gives me a choice of which installation to log onto I get
1 - H:\MiniNT
2 - H:\I386

Neither of these is the installation I want as the installation is on the C: drive. I entered 2 anyway and then could at least go looking around the drives. When I do a directory of H:\I386 it tells me the volume is HP_RECOVERY and lists all the files.

When changing directory to c:\I386\ from the command. Doing a DIR of that folder shows me that almost every .dll file (and other extensions) are renamed .dl_ or .sy_ .ex_ there are a lot of files (5157 actually) but other than autochk.exe and a couple of files all end in _

Any ideas as to where to go from here?