Laptop not booting

Steve_xx

daily wrote: »

Do you know anyone with an XP CD?

a pe disk is better/easier than linux (once you have created the disk - this is the hard part)

http://www.ubcd4win.com/howto.htm

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

I think I might know somebody who may have an XP cd. I was looking under my laptop and note there is a product key for Windows XP. I wonder if Microsoft would give me the disks for it? Or maybe Dell where I bought it.

Steve_xx

Thanks to both Daily, you're a star, and to Browtoa for your help with this.

I purchased a caddy/enclosure from Nexons.co.uk @ only £7.49 inclusin delivery, and I retrieved the files from my corrupted hard drive using my Aspire netbook which uses Linux Lite. I was unable to retrieve them on my mates Vista laptop or my nieces XP laptop and I deduced that this was due to my laptop requiring a password to open it. Linux seemed to ignore this and it allowed me to copy the files I wanted to retrieve onto a USB memory drive.

I have now restored my laptop to its shipped sate and am very happy with the results. It boots and shuts down faster now. I think after 3 years use they get clogged up with all sorts of legacy files etc and it's no bad thing to start them afresh again.