pc has been working fine, until yesterday. i have a dell dimension 4500 windows xp. got a few popups, then couldnt print to the printer from my laptop across my network. rebooted the desktop, it never recovered! it keeps coming up to the safe mode menu page. when i select safe mode, or any of the options including "last know good configuration" it scrolls a bunch of multidisk lines, then goes back to the safe mode menu again. i inserted my dell restore cd, and selected "repair" but it just came up to the c prompt. at that point i figured all hope was lost, and was going to reinstall xp. but, before i went to that extreme i wanted to see if there was any hope of restoring this box, or at least recovering the data that may or may not be still there. i did not run a "dir" at the c prompt, i will try that today and see if the date is still there. any insight would be greatly appreciated.
read all of that website and then try following the steps…
Also, do you have another hard drive or way to store large amounts of data? if so, we can copy all of your data just in case something else happens to it
i put in the reinstall disk, boots to recovery screen. hit r for repair, comes back with c:\> . if i type dir, it comes back with an error message. no matter what i enter at the c prompt it says acccess denied. i tried md tmp, and several of the entries recommemded at the microsoft site, all came back access denied. although when i type 'map', it comes back with:
?: fat32 32mb \device\harddisk0\partition1
c: 38103mb\device\harddisk0\partition2
a: \floppy 0
d:\cd rom 0
e:\cd rom 1
i dont have a spare hard drive, but could i put a new one in, reload xp on that one, and slave my old drive off of it to try and recover my data?
it should be:
copy
without quotes…. sorry if I made that unclear
EDIT: also, you said that you got some popups
what popups? advertisements or windows warnings?
i didnt use the quotes, i only put that in my post so it would stand out. the popups were just advertisements. thanks very much for the assistance so far! this is
a real son of a b?&%#@ !!
Try this no guarantee
If your computer won't boot into the operating system normally, you might be able to boot into Safe Mode and use System Restore to go back to a previous restore point to fix the problem. But what if you can't even boot into safe mode? Then you need to start the System Restore tool from the command line. Here's how:
When booting your computer, press F8 to bring up a boot menu
Select Safe Mode with Command Prompt
Select the operating system to start (if you have multiple operating systems installed)
Log on with an account that is a member of the administrators group
At the command prompt, type %systemroot%\system32\restore\rstrui.exe
Press Enter
This will start the "Welcome to System Restore" screen. Go through the steps of the Wizard and follow the instructions to restore your system to a previous restore point
