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Computer problems
romanqwerty
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
My laptop of 20 or so months old just recently decided to stop working on me. Last night i was using it and it froze up, after a forced shutdown and reboot it now decides not to boot up.
Basically it will go through all its bios stuff fine but half way through loading up windows xp it gives a blue screen for 1/10th of a second and then restarts and tries to boot again.
Basically im looking for any advice on what the problem is? (harware failure or corrupted boot files?) and any advice on how to fix it. I dont mind reformatting but i would really like to get some files off the HD first (music and documents etc).
Basically it will go through all its bios stuff fine but half way through loading up windows xp it gives a blue screen for 1/10th of a second and then restarts and tries to boot again.
Basically im looking for any advice on what the problem is? (harware failure or corrupted boot files?) and any advice on how to fix it. I dont mind reformatting but i would really like to get some files off the HD first (music and documents etc).
romanqwerty on
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Posts
Either:
There's a problem with the boot sector on your hard drive, in which case you'll need to reinstall XP at the boot sector or try installing it in a new partition and booting from there to recover your data. This normally happens when you try to install a new OS, or when you try using hard drive maintenance software that's unstable. However the most likely thing in your case, especially given the suddenness of your shutdown is that something magnetic completely depolarized the drive. If this happened, your hard drive might not even be usable anymore, but at the very least you'll need to reformat. If you install XP in a new partition then what you can do is transfer everything to the new partition then increase the size of your working partition to encompass the unusable partition. There's a good chance it won't work, but if it does you've saved yourself a TON of work.
Or there's a problem with XP itself, which you solve pretty much the same way unless you REALLY know your way around XP. I don't know enough myself to give any advice, but someone else here might or you could try a more technically oriented forum.
This thought also comes to mind: since you're having trouble booting XP itself, there's a small chance that it's having trouble with some hardware. If you've added any hardware within the last month or so, or if you've messed with any drivers or firmware recently, try removing it and see if XP boots normally. You should try removing all non-essential devices to see if it'll boot before trying anything else. If this is the case all you might need to do is replace your driver or buy new hardware.
What would be most useful for helping you is to know exactly what you were doing when it froze and what processes might have been running in the background. Also if you've messed with anything that might be important to the system.
How would i partition the drive in the bios? I have an external hard drive though, can i just install xp onto that and boot from it?
Carefully follow the prompts until it either asks you whether you want to install Windows on a partition, or repair Windows on a partition. If it gives you the option to repair it, you can select that. This will, in 99% of cases, allow you to boot, grab your files and then reformat.
You cannot install XP to an external hard drive and get it to function, easily or nicely, from my experience.