Can't Boot Up Despite Herculean Efforts

About 2 weeks ago my HP Pavilion DV5000 notebook stopped booting up. I've exchanged about 25 emails with HP. Let me try to recreate the sequence of events:
1. MY CA Associates Security Suite was expiring and I decided to replace it with a (free) heavy duty McAFee one which was available from work to employees who used their home computer for work at home. I scanned for viruses, found none.
2. After putting it in Sleep Mode that evening, it started beeping in the middle of the night - it gave me 5 choices - boot up in Safe, Safe withNetwork, Last Config, etc. I tried all of them, no good. Then I took out
battery, turned on with F11 pressed, and got the error message : NTLDRS is corrupt cannot boot.
3. HP advised me to boot up holding F10, which brought me to a screen which enabled me to do a short and then a long test on my hard drive - both passed (sigh of relief!)
4. HP advised me to buy a new recovery CD which I bought for overnight delivery. It did not work. Turns out they sent me the one for XP Home instead of XP Professional.
5. It took them 10 days to call me and arrange to ship the correct one, which I received yesterday.
6. I booted up on that CD, pressed "R" to try to get to the Recovery Screen, but instead got the following message: "Line 17699 of the INF file\ i386\txtsetup.sif is invalid. Setup cannot continue. "

I'm stuck. Like an idiot I never backed up my 5000 pictures, my taxes, list of daughter's wedding attendees, etc etc etc.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated!

 

Hi Howard and welcome,

You can try a boot CD or floppy to substitute for the boot loader files on your HD that may be corrupt, as the error message has indicated.

If you have a floppy drive, download THIS executable file. Then run it and follow the screen directions. It will create a boot floppy with the necessary substitute bootloader files that you can use to boot the sick box. Be sure to set the BIOS sequence to check the floppy first.

If you have no floppy drive, download THIS zipped file. Unzip it to a folder and it will contain an ISO file that you can use with your burner software to create a boot CD that will work the same as the boot floppy above. Remember to set the BIOS sequence to check the CD first.

If you can boot with either of these methods, it's a simple matter to copy the bootloader files from the boot media to your HD root to replace your missing or corrupt ones.

If you can't boot with these methods, you'll likely have to peform a repair install.

ps. A BartPE CD is often very helpful for copying valuable data from an unbootable system. You can also use a Ubuntu system CD that is freely available to access the files. Of course that would mean you would need to have a floppy drive or CD burner or network connection or flash drive to place the retrieved files onto.

 

Thank you SurferDude - this is an awesome place! I know somewhere I have a standalone floppy I can use or I "ll burn a CD on my "old" Dell laptop. I'm very intrigued by your suggestions on copying if I can't boot - not sure where you get the Ubunto system, guess I'll Google to find out.

I just got this message from HP:
"Howard, I do understand that by now you would be very angry with the service. I regret this error which is completely our fault.
Howard, I have set up recovery disks to resend you the Recovery disks. "

What are they talking about?? I thought I already tried the correct Recovery Disc that they sent me. Does this make any sense? Does it mean the disc was corrupted?

Thanks, and REALLY appreciated!

 

That's what it sounds like to me. We all make little slips once in a while. It sounds like they are willing to admit it and correct it. That's encouraging and speaks well of HP support in the long run.

UBUNTU 7.1 source

BartPE source