Windows Xp Does Not Start

HELLO. AFTER A CHKDSK SCAN FOR ERRORS, WHEN I PRESS THE POWER BUTTON ON MY LAPTOP I GET THE FOLLOWING MESSAGE:

" we apologize for the inconvenience, but Windows did not start successfully. A recent hardware or software change might have caused this. ........ "

THEN 5 OPTIONS ARE PRESENTED. Start Windows Normally, Last Known Good Configuration (your most recent settings that worked),
Safe Mode, Safe Mode with Netwoking, and last option Safe Mode with Command Prompt.

I TRIED ALL FIVE OPTIONS AND WINDOWS XP WILL NOT START. I KEEP GETTING THE SAME MESSAGE. WHAT CAN I DO ?
I AM A NEW MEMBER AND DON'T KNOW WHERE TO LOOK FOR AN ANSWER TO THIS PROBLEM. IF POSSIBLE PLEASE SEND ANSWER TO : email addy removed by Christer

 

Peter, If you have critical data on the drive, you should get a BartPE or Ubuntu boot CD to access the data and copy it to other media or network drive.

After that, you can boot to an XP install CD and do a "Repair Install ". That should save your personal files and restore the system files to whatever SP version your install CD happens to be.

I have had checkdisk hose my system drive on a couple of occasions and would never run it with the /r or /f switch without having a good backup image. It rarely happens but it really hurts when it does.