seanakaforty
Topic Starter
Hey guys!
I think I may have dug myself into a hole that I just can't get out of. I've got a laptop running Windows XP and in a nutshell I ended up reinstalling XP and now I can't access certain parts of the hard disk. It all started when I tried to install Windows onto an external USB hard drive so that I could use this hard drive to boot my other computer which doesn't have a functioning hard drive in it. To make a long story short, I didn't like the way my laptop was reacting to this process (it gave me a the "choose operating system" screen and showed two instances of "Windows XP"; there were some other wierd things that it was doing as well. So after changing the boot.ini file, deleting a partition that I had no idea what it was, doing something to the boot sector and doing other things that I never should have even tried (WAAAYYYY outside of my level of expertise…), I decided to just start all over and reinstall Windows (I'm talking on the laptop now, the usb drive is now erased and completely out of the picture).
Now here are some of the problems I'm having with the new install of Windows. For one, I can't open the C:\\ drive. If I double click the icon or go to the C drive through the start menu, I get a message saying that it cannot find what it was looking for (I can't remember the exact message as I'm not on the computer in question right now; but whatever path it was that windows "couldn't find" was some really long line and it had the word "recycler" in it…). The only way that I can see what is on the C drive is to right click and choose "explore"; clicking "open" will result in the same message.
Another problem is that I can't access any of my old files that were in my old "my documents" folder. They are apparently still on the hard drive because the hard drive is still showing the huge chunk of space being taken up (roughly the same amount of space that I know these files take up). In fact, I can still access the old "program files" folder and others (though I doubt if these programs will actually work if I tried to launch them). But when I try to click on the folder: C:\\documents and settings\"my old username" it won't let me access it. No matter what I do, whether it be trying to open the folder, rename it, etc. it tells me that access is denied. It says that either the drive is full or it is write-protected, but nothing I've tried will let me get to it. Another wierd thing is that when I just hover over the folder, or if I right-click it and go to properties, it shows that that there are zero files and zero bytes in the folder, yet the space occupied on my hard-drive shows that these files are still on there…somewhere.
Also, I can't get into internet explorer. When I first did the reinstalled windows, the internet was working fine, but I updated to IE7 and since then I can't open it. When I click on the icon or do run:iexplore.exe a white windows pops up, as if IE starts for a fraction of a millisecond and then it's gone (and the iexplore.exe process dissapears from taskmanager too). Now in between the time that IE was working and IE stopped working, I also let Windows do a whole bunch of automatic updates (including service pack 3 if I'm not mistaken), so I really don't know whether IE stopped working because of the update to IE7 or because of one of the updates that Windows did.
I'm sure there are other problems going on that I haven't even discovered yet, but the laptop is pretty close to being unusable in it's present state. So my first question I guess is are there any ways to remedy the situation and "find" and "access" all of my old files that are apparently hiding somewhere on the hard-drive (again, according to the capacity/free space on the disk)?
With this said, I have to some degree already accepted the fact that I may need to start from absolute scratch. So how do I COMPLETELY erase the hard drive. Not "repair" or "reinstall" windows, but completely get rid of everything on the hard drive so that I can reinstall from scratch. I've tried to format the hard drive, but Windows won't let me because it is a system drive. I've also tried to boot from the windows CD and delete the C:\\ partition, but again, it would let me. What do I do now?
