I foolishly opened an attachment which I believed was legit and it was an executable. What I saw happen was as if the computer rebooted and when it tried to come up there was only a message that says something like:
Nt won't start due to not enough low memory...you have 499K and need 512K
What I've done so far after trying everything I know is to take the hard drive out, put it in an external box and make an image of the entire drive on my win8.1 machine. I can now get to the files but there are some I cannot find...there are a lot of files on there. The main issue now is that I would like to try and get the computer running again because I have programs on there that will only run in xp and I need them. This is my only xp machine at this point.
Right now, I've put in an ubuntu boot disk and have the machine working without the hard drive, just to see if there's anything wrong hardware-wise. Unfortunately I don't know much about ubuntu and so far it's not gained me much.
I'm thinking as a last resort to putting the hard drive back in and try to access the D: drive since it's an HP machine and just return the machine to original state. I do have the image of the disk on my other computer. But I'm not sure this plan will allow me to run programs even if I copy the image back because of registry issues. That's a question as I'm at the edge of my knowledge.
I don't want to take any chances in case it is possible to get this thing up and running again so that's why I'm here at this point and I appreciate any help.