No boot, no rescue disk

My daughter's Gateway laptop will go the Gateway screen which allows me to get into bios but only shows blue screen after that. XP was factory loaded, I guess, and the cd she has says it will erase everything. I'm prepared to erase everything, but she wants to save some Word files first. If I download an XP rescue disk from somewhere, will it allow me to copy files before reinstalling XP?

 

I would recommend a BartPE boot CD. It will allow access to the drive for copying files to other media.

As an alternate, Ubuntu 7.1 works very well.

Either one will get the job done if your HD is not damaged.

 

Thanks. I'll try that and see how it works, let you know Friday.

 

I downloaded the Bart Pe disk but it didn't work on my daughter's machine (although it worked fine on mine, but then mine isn't ailing) because at some point the PE starts XP, at least for a moment, but her XP is so corrupted that the process ends there and I get the message that if this problem persists I should contact an expert, or words to that effect...So, again, is there a way to get this machine to open to a DOS command so that I can find and copy her files?

 

It sounds like the files are hopelessly lost. There is a possibility that the HD has failed. You can test it by getting the Hard Drive Diagnostic tool.

If you can borrow an XP install CD from a friend you can use it to perform a "Repair Install" that would save the personal files. It's worth a try but may not work if the drive has a hardware failure.

There's not much else that you can do given that the Bart PE can't see the drive data.

I assume your installation had the NTFS file system, which is pretty much the standard. With that, there is no native DOS boot method that will allow file access. That's why the Bart PE boot CD is so handy although apparently not this time.

 

My daughter has called in professional help. I'll let you know if anything interesting occurs. Thanks for you assistance.

 

Okay, if she hasn't already called in the pros, I'll try Ubuntu next week. Thanks.

 

Nope, Ubuntu doesn't show up at all. The machine comes up on the Gateway screen. When I go to restore, the message says Problem seems to be caused by the following file, N32K.?_Page_Fault_In_NonPaged_Area. The question mark (?) is my substitute for a word I missed when transcribing.

 

By chance, did you change the boot order on the PC to boot from the CD-ROM drive first when using the Ubuntu LiveCD? I find Knoppix to be better in rescue situations such as this since it seems to be very good at detecting hardware. It also contains a lot of diagnostic tools built-in.

If you start tapping F8 immediately after the BIOS splash screen, do you get the menu where you can boot to the Windows Safe Mode?

 

Can't get into safe mode. And yes, it is supposedly booting from the cd as the first option.

 

Hi pstanhope

A few suggestions ..
When you downloaded Ubuntu (Live version run from a CD) is a two step process. First you download, generally a .ISO (image) file. Then you need a CD burning program which can burn an IMAGE file to a CD. This is different than copying a file to CD.
Once this is done, put CD in problem computer and turn computer off / turn computer ON. When a screen view comes to view look for any keyboard value which takes you to BIOS. Once in BIOS, change the startup process to boot from CD First. Save / close the BIOS settings and Reboot the computer. The computer now should start / run from the CD. Follow the prompts on the screen.

 

I did it all, step by step (and you were right, I had simply copied the program previously. This time I burned it.) Again, no response. The sequence remains, Gateway screen (options for bios and boot up), "press f11 to start recover ", the XP screen, then nothing. I know that it checks the cd first at bootup because BartPE will show up, for all the good it does, which is to say it takes about 30 seconds then goes to XP and nothing.

 

See attached picture / Gateway support.
Please open BIOS, and checked to verify CD is set for boot up device before system HDD.
Gateway support states notebooks can access BIOS via F2 key during startup except for notebooks listed.

When you created your Linux startup disk, could you please provide the name of the burning program you used and the option(s) you used to burn the CD.

Could you provide the website link you used to download the Linux CDLive source ISO file.

Thanks

 

"See attached picture / Gateway support.
Please open BIOS, and checked to verify CD is set for boot up device before system HDD.
Gateway support states notebooks can access BIOS via F2 key during startup except for notebooks listed. "

I have never had a problem getting into the bios and, yes, the CD is listed as first choice for boot-up, before HDD....I'll have to check on the burner and the website, but I do remember the website was included in this thread.