<3 windows NOT

[gorn]

So I get a call today from someone I haven&#039;t talked to in a while, computer problems... Sounds like Windows XP is screwed up so I&#039;m trying to think of how to walk her through fixing it, she doesn&#039;t have backups and doesn&#039;t want to lose her data. Luckily Dell is one of the few less-brain-dead marketers that actually includes a Windows XP disk, rather than just the restore crap. So I walk her through CMOS Setup, and the beginnings of installing XP, but her partition shows as Unknown and XP won&#039;t see it without a reformat. Recovery console won&#039;t even dir C:\. And to make matters worse she&#039;s a good few hundrend miles away so I can&#039;t easily take a look.

But she&#039;ll be in town next month and hopefully I can view the files through linux, or at least find space to stow a 60GB image and fix her computer and try to grab the real important files by hand.

If only the world used a less faulty OS.

[trickster]

We use Dell machines at wor, and I&#039;ve seen that problem. One thing you might want to try is have her boot to the Windows cd and select Repair, instead of reinstall. Then run checkdisk.

To get to the console:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/u...ps/doug92.mspx

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;307654

[gorn]

what&#039;s checkdisk do? like fsck i assume?
[edit]okay re-read your post and it sounds like using Repair it might be able to fix the install, then from the new install it could checkdisk? Or maybe I could even have her go to command prompt rather than safe mode and use checkdisk[/edit]

Her problem was it was booting up and asking Safe Mode or Normal, either one gives her a blue screen.

[Compunuts]

It might be a faulty driver. Roll back to certain stage function would help? Sorry just guessions without any concrete help since my last install of winders was 2K.

[trickster]

[quote author=gorn link=board=17;threadid=9458;start=0#msg85760 date=1088879865]
what&#039;s checkdisk do? like fsck i assume?
[edit]okay re-read your post and it sounds like using Repair it might be able to fix the install, then from the new install it could checkdisk? Or maybe I could even have her go to command prompt rather than safe mode and use checkdisk[/edit]

Her problem was it was booting up and asking Safe Mode or Normal, either one gives her a blue screen.
[/quote]
Checkdisk is the equivalent to fsck.
If she boots to the cd, as if she were to reinstall, it will give her an option to either reinstall or repair.
She should select repair. It should ask her then if she wants to try automagic repair or go to a repair console. She should select the repair console.
The repair console is an emulation of DOS.
It will prompt her to type in the admin password. Afterwards, she will have a dos-like prompt.
From there, she can run different commands.
She can run chkdsk, which is the equivalent to fsck. I think there is a switch to force check.

chkdsk -f

That should fix the filesystem, and hopefully, make it readable again.