That poor HP..

[Minimum]

I have not worked with HPs that much if any but I decided to help a friend out with his. Basically a long story short he tried to use System Restore on his HP Media Center PC 873N (Windows XP Home) to fix a problem with his fancy HP keyboard after fixing his anti-virus. The full story is hard to remember anyway and it's pretty beat up. Anyway, he used System Restore to fix something and well it didn't so he went back to undo the restore for like three days prior since I'm guessing he didn't have one closer. All that happened when he went to open System Restore was that the first time he clicked it it would do nothing and the second time would bring up a blank window. Weird, huh? Thinking that something was wrong he went to use the weird HP restore feature (no cds and wtf?) and after going through the restore while choosing the function to keep the files but repair the programs he got thoroughly screwed with a nice black screen with "NTLDR is compressed press Ctrl, Atl, & Del to restart". Pressing the three does nothing but restart to the same screen. Can still restart and press F10 to bring up the restore function from HP but that doesn't do much. Can get BIOS to show up. I didn't know what to tell him at that point since I'm not a top quality tech support person and just use the knowledge that I have learned from my own problems and tinkering. Any help folks? I would appreciate it and my friend would as well. Thanks.

[rabidaardvark]

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