Power out during defrag - now won't boot

I inadvertently pulled out the power cord on my wife's Compaq Evo N610c, running XP Pro SP3, during a defrag. It had been having charging problems for a couple of weeks and had no battery charge - I was waiting for a quiet moment to take it in for servicing - so it crashed totally with no power.

It then went into a loop of rebooting, getting as far as the Windows logo. Then there's a message screen in white characters on a light-blue background (like the message "you need to run checkdisk ", only shorter, about half a screen) which flashes so quick and short that it's impossible to read, and then a reboot.

(And this after a loooong session updating, SP3 and others, registry cleanout, defrag..... )

Tried again this morning after cooling down (the laptop, my wife and I), but no progress.

It's normally networked with my main box, running XP Home SP3, but of course if I can't power it up, I can't get in to it from another machine, can I?

Any kind suggestions?

(I'll be in and out for a couple of days - mainly hiding - so no quick reply from me is not a discourtesy on my part.)

 

See if others might have a suggestion, but I might expect the only way out would be to do a Repair Reinstall of Windows. You may need to read about if the model you have can run such a reinstall, normally you could boot to a Windows CD, then after the Eula, there is an option to "repair the current installation of Windows ".

If you have the manual/User Guide, it should have information there.

Matt

 

Many thanks, Matt and Pete, for swift replies!

As it happens, I do have an original XP CD, albeit Home Edition, for my other machine, but no manual/user guide. In my panic I didn't think of trying that. I'll try it, as you suggest. I may finish up with Home Edition on both boxes, but that is the least problem.

I'm aware of the defrag process as described by Pete. This is why I'm hoping that only one file - precisely the one that was being defragged at power-down - has been garbaged and needs replacing, and it just happened to be a file that's essential to the boot process. If so, I'm really lucky!

I'll report back on whether that solution works, but it may not be for a day or two. When I do get around to it, I'll check again here first in case there's other wisdom available. Thanks again.

 

g. watson, There's a good chance that your Repair Install will run aground due to the version difference. If you can beg, borrow, or steal a Pro version, you will be on better footing.

If there is valuable personal data at risk, you should consider making a BartPE boot CD and copying the data to separate media, such as a flash drive, etc.

Best wishes on your work ahead.

 

Reolved!

Thanks, SurferDude, yes, I knew there was a chance of running aground, but thought it was worth a try, because at worst I'd finish up installing Home Edition. It was.

I enabled "boot from CD" in the ROM setup and loaded the XP Home CD. After going through some hoops, I got a C:> prompt and typing HELP got me a list of standard-looking DOS commands. I ran CHKDSK and that solved the problem. But it took a looooong time, and stopped (with a lot of HD activity) for about 20 minutes each at the 50% and 75% marks.

Lessons learned:
1. stop and think, don't panic!
2. get that charging circuit fixed ASAP, so that a power-out doesn't leave me with my pants down again.

Thanks for the customary support and patience, guys.

 

Interesting. It seems it may have just been a problem in the tracing system rather than in the files themselves.

Thanks for letting us know.

Matt