Is Windows corrupted or is the Hard Drive?

[shadow187]

I spent some time gaming last night, was fun, and everything went well. Went to bed, and the next morning I can't log-in to any of my users.

I have two hard-drives, both formatted with Windows. Mine, and my parents'. I can boot into mine just fine, but when I try to boot off of their HDD (which is the main one), it won't work. There's three accounts, and whenever I select one, I'll see, "Loading user..." or something along those lines. It'll freeze from there, and nothing except rebooting will escape. I can't get into Safe Mode either because SM seems to load with 19x16 resolution, which is, "Out of Range," of my 19'' monitor.

When I logged into my drive, AVAST came up and found/deleted a Trj virus from the main directory of the other drive (F:\VIRUS.EXE[not the real name]). Still can't boot into it. I can access the drive from my other HDD though, so that leads me to believe that the inaccessibility is due to Windows being corrupted in one way or another.

Now normally I'd try to reinstall Windows, but apparently the administrator password can't be found anywhere. I've tried changing the password to the Administrator account, even deleting it, and nothing works.

Is there a way to reinstall Windows from my Hard-Drive?
Any help?

Sys specs:
AMD Athlon 3000+ 2ghz
1GB Ram
Windows XP 32-Bit SP3

 

[Jonmor68]

Are these drives setup as a dual boot from a startup menu, or are they chosen from the bios screen? it could make a difference to the way you need to procede.
You will need the Windows ??? cd/dvd to reinstall.

 

[shadow187]

They're chosen from the BIOS screen. I only use the OS off of one drive, the other is just from a dead computer; so it's just storage.

 

[pjmelect]

Removing the virus from your parent’s hard disk may have corrupted the windows installation if a vital file was infected. Normally if an anti virus program removes a vital file then Windows will restore it from its backup. However it won’t restore files on another disk.
If the other disk was monitored by system restore then you may be able to restore to before the problem, or most anti virus programs have a virus vault and you can recover the file from there, or if you find out what was the file that was deleted you can copy the file from your system to your parents disk. Failing all that you will have to do a repair install of the problem disk.

 

[shadow187]

The deletion of the virus had nothing to do with the freezing-at-logon. It did that before and after.