was looking at a friends computer at the weekend after being told it wouldn't work, and when trying to log in, am confronted with an error stating microsoft has encountered a problem and can not recognise the licence or something (error 0x800700c1).
tried booting in safe mode (with and without command prompt) and after selecting a user to log in with, i am now being hit with the message:
'16 bit MS-DOS subsystem
C:\windows\system32\userinit.exe
C:\windows\system32\Autoexe.nt the system file is not suitable for running MS-DOS and microsoft windows applications. choose close to terminat the application.'
basically, this is now telling me i can't even log in under safe mode to perform a system restore or anything. is there anyway to solve this, without having to rebuild the computer. (she has had the computer for about 1 1/2 years and believes it came with XP pre installed)
thanks for any assistance in this, greatly appreciated
Have a look here and see if it offers any help MS Support Forum, A Google of the error code will bring numerous results, maybe a post in XP for the MSVPs to see is another.
If your aim was to do a system restore in safe mode I would recommend you using trying to use the feature "last known good configuration" which can be found in the same menu where you chose to boot to safe mode.
This feature is the same as a system restore however you are NOT able to chose the date you wish to step back to.
Instead the computer will scan through the dates available itself and chose to boot to the closest date it recognizes as "working".
As usual. System Restore and LKGC is supposed to be safe and the loss of data should be 0% but as prooven before this is not correct and the chance of corrupt installed programs and such is still there although it is slim.
Can not seem to do anything 
Linear Mode
