Slow boot and no desktop icons or taskbar! (XP Pro)

[Kahnovitch]

Forgive me if this has been addressed before. I did search through the threads and couldn't find anything relevant.

Basically last night my HDD kept switching itself off and crashing my OS (WinXP Pro) after several occurances of this I changed the IDE cable and it seemed fine.
The normal scandisk screen came up and many files had become crosslinked and were truncated etc.
Anyway to get to the point, my PC boots okay but there is no taskbar, no start menu, no desktop icons, nada!

I can run programs using task manager but I cannot restore the desktop.
I tried going into safe mode to restore a previous version, but safe mode comes up with a blank, black screen.

Does someone know how I can I run the "restore" application using just task manager, or is there any other method I can use to get my desktop back?

Thanks in advance.

[bailey]

you should be able to do a install repaire by booting up with the cd . it will repaire any bad system files and not tuch any data or software

[Kahnovitch]

Cheers mate, I did exactly that and now it's ok once more.