A good old fashioned repair install question for branded PC's

I have a couple of machines on the bench that have had viruses removed and now refuse to boot with a variety of STop errors that I cant find solutions for.

I would like to just do a repair install but wanted to check whether it would work because of teh nature of the machines.

One is a Dell and one in an IBM, both of which have restore partitions but I would rather not format the hard drives which seems to be unavoidable when using the manufacturers recovery partitions.

Can I just do a regular repair install or is it likely to screw things up big time. I have done it a hundred times on clone machines without issue but you know what these pesky big-boy manufacturers can be like.

 

You may be able to do a repair install via their recovery software, you would have to run it and see what the options are given for a nondestructive recovery.

Don't do it with a retail disk...it will end up in the ripping out of hair and gnashing of teeth.

What are the stop errors? If they are registry related...a repair would do more harm than good.

 

One is;

Stop C0000135 {unable to locate component}
This application has failed to start because basefwl32 was not found. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

And the other seems to change every reboot