severe booting problems XP home.

Hi there,

I am desperately in need of some help and advice with my Dell inspiron 6000 Laptop. My problem started with the "˜blue screen of death’. I restart the computer and couldn’t get into the login screen, I couldn’t even get safe mode to boot, this led me to believe I hade serious booting problems. I then made attempts to try and repair my windows home edition, but unfortunately it didn’t give me the repair option and I definitely didn’t want to install a fresh windows.

I then ran a hard drive diagnostic and everything passed. I also ran a CHKDSK and that corrected some errors but seemed to pass.

I got a little worried about losing my documents and data, so I tried using "˜the ultimate boot cd’ that someone recommended on a forum. I tried to copy the hard drive to an external HD but this didn’t work.

My next step to back up data was by taking the laptop hard drive out and sticking it as a slave in to my PC. This saw the hard drive, but when I tried to find it in "˜my computer’ it wasn’t there, despite recognising it as a device within system properties. I then looked in "˜Disk Management’ and it showed a black line and "˜disk unallocated’. Having been unable to recover data I stuck it back into the laptop and turned the power on. I now get "˜no boot sector on hard drive’ and so it automatically starts booting the windows disc in my cd drive.

From here I then ran "˜bootcfg / scan’ from the recover console and it says’ failed to successfully scan disks for windows installations’. It then recommended me to run CHKDSK and now I get an error message saying "˜the specified drive is not valid, or there is not disk in the drive’

The problem has now got worse and I fear I have lost all my important documents.
Can anyone help me repair my computer or even give advice to back up documents from a hard drive that at the moment is inaccessible?

Any advice and help would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Splung

 

Hi splung,

There is the possibility that your HD boot sector is damaged but your data is still intact.

Download and unzip XPbootCD2P3D.zip. It will unzip an ISO file that your burner software can use to create a bootable CD. This CD can substitute for your damaged boot sector and allow access to your data for backup purposes. Boot with it in the drive bay. You may need to change your BIOS/CMOS setup to allow it to boot from the CD-ROM drive.

It will present several selections, use the one appropriate for your particular installation. The normal one would be the first one on the list, 1st HD 1st partition. Windows is normally installed to that drive and partition but some OEM install may differ. As the name implies, you can use it to boot any of three different physical drives and either the first or second partition on each.

Post back if you are not familiar with using ISO files to create CD's.

 

Thanks surferdude2 for your help. I tried the boot application you suggested and tried all partitions with no success...i received an error message each time . Do you have any other ideas?
Thanks

Splung

 

You'll need an XP install CD to do a repair install. Are you sure your Dell CD doesn't allow a repair install? The ones I have worked on do. You just proceed as if to install XP anew but you will arrive at a screen that asks if you want to repair the existing install. Perhaps you didn't go that far along.