Please Help before wife kills me

I have a desk top HP Pavilion slimline s7520n It has window xp media edition. It updated through windows update to sp3 then it froze and when restarted it gives a blue screen with stop:0x0000007e. Now it will not start in safe mode or normal. I can not find my xp disk that came with it. I tried the recovery file but it asks for a password. Will a start up disc help me start up? If not please help me fix this. I do have 2 other computers both have xp home on them, but my wife wants to keep xp media edition. Thank you. Please help.

Windows xp media edition
HP Pavilion Slimline s7520n desktop (all factory)
internet xplorer
dsl

 

try a live linux boot disk like knoppix that will boot and then you can copy all your important files and back them up off the drive, then format

 

Did you try leaving the password blank and hitting enter?

 

Seems a bit drastic... we haven't tried anything to fix this yet.

As suggested above, try just pressing Enter at the recovery console password prompt. If it doesn't work, there is a way to get around the password, but it requires editing the registry which can be a bit tricky if you can't get to the desktop....
Anyway, if you can get into the recovery console, try running a file system repair by typing chkdsk c: /r and pressing Enter. It may take some time, so be patient. It may appear to have locked up, and you might see the progress counter backwards. Don't worry, it's all good and it will finish, eventually. You can get to the recovery console by booting to any XP install CD; it doesn't have to be the same version that's on the PC.

Good luck! I hope this helps!

[dlb]
:major

NOTE: in the chkdsk command, there is a space before and after the C: - If you don't use the spaces, the command will error out and not work.

 

Awesome thank you so much my wife loves me again. Thank yall so much for the help