Win XP MCE and file ownership problems.

[TGA]

I am unsure where to start so I will just start at the beginning and hopefully you guys can skim the needed details from what I expect to be a rather long post.

Yesterday my cousin brought me her laptop telling me it wont load windows. It's a gateway from 06 running MCE. So I powered it up and and try to load windows normally and BSOD soon after. I then tried last known good and safe mode but got the same BSOD. She of course can't find her gateway restore disk and I don't own a copy of MCE but suspect I wouldn't be able to do a repair install of this OEM even if I did.

My first reaction being a laptop is that the drive is dieing. So I pull the drive fin it is a WD and download there diagnostic tools. Well when I boot from a diagnostics disk the PC seemed to be hiding the hard drive from me. So the only thing I could come up with was to connect the drive to my PC and run the tools that way. Sure enough this worked but the WD tools tell me nothing is wrong with the drive. However I can't read it, vista is telling me the data is corrupted. When I booted my PC with the drive connected vista wanted to run chk disk on it but I canceled. This reminded me that she indicated XP did a CHK disk of it's own when this all started for her.

So running out of ideas I then had vista do a CHK disk on the drive. It said the SSID table or maybe it was index was corrupted and replaced it with a default one. It then scanned and updated the SSID of every file on the system. When it was done I was then able to access the drive. I probably should have stopped here and put the drive back in to the laptop but she was freaking out about loosing he important data of course wasn't back up. So I was like ok, what better time to copy that data over to my PC for a backup?

Well vita told me I didn't have rights to the data on the drive to make a copy so I told it to take ownership of the files and I think this is what cause the problem that I now have. So I made the backup and put the drive back in to the laptop.

To my surprise the laptop booted right to the desktop. I was then greeted with some errors about her spy ware scanner and an MS office grove program not starting. Then when the HD activity stopped I realized I had no task bar or start button, great. So I check and sure enough system restore is enabled so I thought great I will just roll it back a few days and all will be well. Wrong, system restore wont run not even from the command line. I suspected this was related to the system restore service not starting up So I went to start it up but it tells me dependency's could not be started but right clicking and selecting properties would not work. So I looked up what was needed and found just RCP is needed to run that service. At this point I knew I was in trouble since RCP service is rather important to windows operation. Especially when trying to start RCP resulted in a error code 5 (access denied).

At this point I am stuck and don't know what to do. I suspect that taking ownership of the drive with my vista machine caused this problem. So on to the questions finally.

Assuming I can get RCP running again is it still possible that a roll back could solve the rest?

If so does anyone have any idea how I can get the RCP service to run? If not does anyone know how I can restore proper system file rights?

Thanks in advance
Tom

 

[TGA]

So no one has any ideas?

I was thinking this could be as simple as replacing a few files with maybe some editing before doing so? Am I that far off on this? I really thought someone who has some experience with user group policy management for lager networks would be familiar enough with this sort of thing to at least point me in the right direction.

No one else here has ever lost the rights needed for the system to start up some of its services?