IT Help - Baxter? Others?

So, my XP laptop decided that last night was it's last night on earth. It locked up during use - wouldn't respond to Cntrl-Alt-Del or anything. Powered it down, and now it gets most of the way through booting up, then stops. I never get a desktop.

I'm cool with wiping the machine and starting over, but I'd really like to salvage my files first. I don't have any recent backups. Doh!

What is my best course of action?

I'm currently downloading an Ubuntu disk on the theory that I can boot from it, and get on the machine long enough to backup my files. Is this valid? Is there a better way?

Help!

That's what I would do... It sounds like some sort of boot file is corrupted. If so, the stuff on the drive should be fine and perfectly accessible, it's just the OS that's shot. You should be able to boot from another drive (disc, whatever) and get your stuff.

That will work fine, just plug in a USB harddrive and go to town. One other thing you can try is to download BartPE, it is like Ubuntu cd but is XP. Once you have that run chckdisk, I have used that quite a few times to get machines going again.

I haven't messed with repairing XP, but with win2K if you can boot from the install CD, you can get to a console and/or repair/reinstall section.

First, try booting into safe mode (press F8 a bunch of times down while it is booting). If it comes up, then you can get your files off and go from there.

Can you boot into safe mode? Hit F8 during the startup process (right after the BIOS info disappears, IIRC) and you should be given the options. Sometimes simply booting into safe mode, shutting down normally and then rebooting as usual will bring a machine back up. Might not work, but it's easy.

Can boot from the XP CD and get to the repair functions and the DOS prompt, but the auto-repair didn't fix it and I keep getting "Access Denied" when I try to get to my data via the DOS Prompt.

Can't boot into safe mode.

Alright - BartPE booted up, complete with a gui and everything. It's the most alive the computer has looked in the last 12 hours, so that's cool. Got a command prompt and am running chkdsk. I don't see any kind of file utility for going and backing up my stuff to CD or an external HD. Am I missing something?

Also have the Ubuntu ISO burning right now as phase II of operation data salvage...

Couldn't figure out how to backup data via BartPE, so I am now on to Ubuntu. I booted up under the "Try it without changing your system" option. I can't find my files. Is that because it won't look anywhere but on the CD? Do I have to do a full install to get my stuff? If so, is there an option to configure it for dual boot? I don't want to ditch XP entirely - at least not yet.

Did Bart finish check disk? If see if the machine will boot now, a lot of times that is all you need to do. If it still will not boot up you can start it with Bart, plug in a USB drive and use Windows Explorer to copy off what ever you want to save, just like regular XP.

81gtv6 wrote: Did Bart finish check disk? If see if the machine will boot now, a lot of times that is all you need to do. If it still will not boot up you can start it with Bart, plug in a USB drive and use Windows Explorer to copy off what ever you want to save, just like regular XP.

Wouldn't boot after chkdsk.

How do you get to windows explorer in the Bart gui?

Another plan - A buddy suggested getting a 2.5" external enclusure and using that to access the data via USB with another computer. Thoughts?

VICTORY! The external enclosure is allowing me to back the data up via USB. Kinda slow, but I'll take it! Once that's taken care of, I'll wipe the disk and do a fresh XP install.

Alright - All relevant data (I HOPE!) backed up to another computer, Laptop HD wiped clean, and currently going through an XP fresh install.

It was scary as crap selecting a hard drive that has all of my work for the past several years on it, and hitting the format button. Hope I don't regret it...

Posting from the formerly dead laptop. 15 hours later. God I hate computers... :)

Thanks for the help guys.

I'm glad for you that you were able to recover your data. And now you'll be a good boy and do regular backups, right? Nah, I don't either and I've been there several times, once with 1000+ pictures on the drive (though that was my fault for screwing around with dual-booting OS X on a non-mac).

I'll do regular backups for at least the next 2 week...

Glad you got it going again.

Me too. Thanks for the help.

I bought a couple extra thumb drives. I periodically zip up my documents and copy them over to the thumb drive, and my important stuff gets auto backed up to it. That way, worst case, I can just pull the thumb drive and start over. The thumb drives are cheap these days and a 1 to 4 GB drive should do you fine.