Well after days of fruitless labor, and endless repetitions of the same tasks, we finally got our friend's computer fixed, and running better than new. Part of the problem was needing to wait for the parts we ordered, and my g/f insisting on trying to do some of the work before we replaced the Motherboard, CPU, RAM, and power supply. I didn't mind trying once, but after the third attempt or so, I was certain that most things would not be doable until we at least had the hardware side taken care of.
So started replacing it yesterday afternoon, and I had it replaced, bios configged right, and gave it back to my g/f to do yet one more rfestore from an image to get it to boot into windows. She then finally gave me free reign to finish, and now able to delete all the extended partitions, and then create new ones to replace them as primary partitions fixed the other big problem. After that it was just a matter of moving files around, a defrag, some antispyware scans, and it was done.
So I am free of the broken computer hasnging over my head, and our friend is jazzed to get her computer back working better than it ever had.
