Xp Pro Crash & Other Trouble

So here's whats going on with my lovely system

My apartment had a power outage on friday and my computer happened to be on at the time. Everything was alright with it, except that it kept telling me I had to reactive Windows XP Pro, and I had seven days to do it before it locked me out. I tried to use system restore, but it would not open after several attempts.

I called home to my parents, and they had me call their computer tech guy/friend. He told me to first uninstall service pack 2 so I could use the xpreset.exe avail in service pack 1. Well...after uninstalling service pack 2, windows is refusing to open at all. I can't make it to the log in screen and I've tried every form of Save Mode.

I am currently being over nighted a system recovery disc, but I'm terrified that I'm going to lose everything on my C:// drive (I have 2 hard drives, windows is on this one) -- I have instructions that should help repair it, but am I gonna lose everything? Should this fix it or did I really do something irreversable? This happen to anyone else before?

 

Well the system restore is going to format the hard drive and reinstall windows like the computer was fresh from the factory. try booting from a windows xp pro installation disc (not a restore cd) and using the repair function after setup performs a scan for current installations of windows.