Corrupted windows xp no recovery cd

I have an acer aspire 3620 with windows xp want to reinstall os but don't have recovery or installation cd. My laptop had an infection in jan of this year. Ms had me just supply any winsxp cd which was a dell. In the process the product key was changed.

Anyway this laptop is shared by the family and has become infected again and when I try to restore to a previous time it won't allow me to. I' thinking it's due to updates, but not 100% sure.

Acer told me that they don't sell the origianl installation nor recovery cd after 3 years, and xp isn't for sell, well I haven't checked any of the smaller computer repair centers.

1. When Ms repaired my laptop they never touched the pqservice partition, is there a copy of the original install, that can be reactivated?
2. If there is will it restore some of the things that haven't been available on my system since the repair?

Items missing:
scroll key on touchpad
wireless & bluetooth switches
Nti backup
Acer data

Will this work if os was replaced on 2nd partition?

Thank you for the information, I'm going to try that later on today.

Well I tried recovery, during recovery it said missing "preload files". So now when it boots up, I get a black screen with about 7 symbols. I did make a backup image of my hard drive.
When I tried to repair with another wins cd it asked for password.
I'd rather do this without placing the other image back on system.
Is there another possible solution?

I don't think so.
My brother gave me the laptop & he doesn't really know anything about computers.
Anyway I'm going to keep working on restoring a little later.

The problem is that ms had me install windows, but didn't touch the recovery partition so I have to set old mbr so recovery can write to partition.

That's where they wanted password when I selected to repair.

It's booting, but after splash screen, it says "setup not complete run setup again"

I think I haven't really explained what I'm trying to do clearly.
I installed windows with the help of M$ technician. Using a Dell cd
He only had me install to C:/
PQ was left untouched

1. I'm trying to restore laptop to factory setup.

2. I was only using xp cd to access repair console.The password they were asking for was not reqired. So now I have to find my way around pq Service and copy the 2 files to the directory to get Alt+F10 key to work
also I need to find out what it takes to enable "preload tag"

As far as this message it's probably related to erecovery message "Can not Find C:/preload tag.

I just used testdisk and I think that I have the 2 items copied to home folder.
winmbr.exe & rtmbr.bin.
I imaged my drive using clonezilla before performing so I think I'm safe.

Before I started I made an image of my hdd, so I'm not too worried.
I have another hdd with wins 7 on it, so I'm going to put the drive in an inclosure and make the changes that I need to make.

I'm almost thinking my drives have been remapped.

I'm using mini-winsxp on hbcd and I can see
preload.aaa
PRELOAD.REV
PRELOAD.TAG

Everything that was on my C;/ drive is now on D:/
I think that is why preload tag

Thanks qhn.
I did google STCDBOOT.ISO and it is part of recovery, as far as screenshots I may have to go into control panel or keyboard settings to enable the keys.
It's good to know that I could get it restored,but, it took a long time for it to update though.

I was able to restore by using the instructions at this forum to unhide PQService.
copy MBRWRWIN & RTMBR.BIN
hide PQService
execute "mbrwrwin install rtmbr.bin"
Alt+ F10 works, it goes thru the whole routine, even starts copying files, on reboot it doesn't load, all I get is some crazy symbols.
originally couldn't find preload tags
not sure if it helped but they were in my D:/drive, so I copied to C:/drive
still goes thru routine, same thing.

I get my gparted-live -cd and look at my partitions, not sure what I'm looking for, I've been changing partitions all along thru whole process, but the only thing I see using gparted is that my #2 partition reminds me of a swap partition. Not only that , but when I put my hdd in an enclosure they're backwords.

I exit gparted and opened testdisk which on gparted cd do an extended scan
and notice that even though I aws able to do a screenshot using wins7 a couple of posts previous, it was marked as deleted, so I toggle it to P instead of D and rebooted.

I hope this helps someone. Thread solved.