system wont boot - possibly lost everything :(

steven7942 · 23 Jan 2010

I recent had a friend of mine upgrade my dell inspiron 6400 windows xp to 7 - they did a clean install after wiping all the rubbish from my old xp for me... the new 7 was working fine but i noticed i was getting a warning message saying that my hard drive was problematic... yesterday the pc crashed and now when i try to boot the pc says:

1.Launch startup repair (recommended) or
2.start windows normally

option 2 causes the system to crash, blue screen flashes up fast then goes black
option 1 will take me to the

i have the installation disk for windows 7 and i have even tried booting from it but the problem is that when i go into the system recovery options i get 2 options:

1. use recovery tools to fix the problem - select OS to repair
2. restore your computer using system image earlier created

the problem is that there is also a box listing the OS and it is blank - partition size is also blank as well as location

i do have an option to load drivers and when i cliick that it takes me into a file called system 32 in the boot x: drive - the name of the c drive is reading system reserved.

all items under optopn 1. either dont work or dont do anything

Can anyone help me get my old desktop back, please please please, i dont know what to do

JordanJP · 23 Jan 2010

did you back up your data beforehand ? Losing everything can be a real nightmare !

Anyway If you can't boot, try logging into Safe Mode, perhaps you'll have luck finding the culprit there

Best

JordanJP

SIW2 · 23 Jan 2010

Sounds like it may well be a HD problem .

You may be able to get your data off - if you can get something with a bootable file transfer wizard to recognize it.

There is always this trick:

freeze-your-hard-drive-to-recover-data

steven7942 · 23 Jan 2010

thanks for the info so far guys, i dont have the option for safe mode - the only 2 options that show are

1.Launch startup repair (recommended) or
2.start windows normally

hmm, bootable transfer wizard, i will google them later - i am guessing i can download them from somewhere

yes, i will try freezing too - interesting tip :)

SIW2 · 23 Jan 2010

There are a few - this one is free - it is a bootable antivirus - ignore that bit - it includes:

The Midnight Commander file manager is used to work with files you need to copy to a safe location

Dr.Web CureIt! — ??????? ????????? ?????????! ??????? ???????, ?????? ?????????? ?????????!

CarlTR6 · 23 Jan 2010

It does, indeed, sound like an HD problem. I went through that about two months ago - same symptoms. I was using XP pro at the time. Since I had to buy a new hard drive, I opted for Windows 7. Fortunately, I was able able to recover about 60% of my fines that I had not been backed up. I definitely learned to back up routinesly!!