dead pc?

thamesmatt

Argh! I have a problem and I think it might be a big one.

My trusty old medion PC which worked fine on Sunday suddenly declared windows hadnt shut down properly and I was prompted with the safe mode start last good version etc...

I chose to just start anyway as I know it seemed to shut down fine.

No luck it sent me back to the above choices so I chose the last known good settings,

No luck back to that screen again so I chose safe mode.

It then just kept declaring there had been a disk error press CRTL ALT DELETE to continue, I did several times and it just returned me to there.

My questions....

1. is it dead? if so how can I rescue my music and more importantly photos. I last backed up about 2 months ago before my hols so there are 100s of precious pictures on there!

2. if its not dead what do I do? My most pressing problem is my photos and if I could log in safely for just 2 mins I could save them all!

3. possible problem is that my disks that came with the PC seem to have corrupted and a friend did a cheeky fix to get me going again the last time I had a problem so I am effectivly system diskless!

Its 4 years old now and has served me well so if its dead its dead! the monitor and speakers are fine so they can go on to live another day but i need those photos or I will be more upset than the woman in the BT ad who is married to the bloke out of My Family

I hope you can help!!

matt

Lakeuk

Don't know how you can get out of the mess from what you've said.

My best recommendation is to buy a new harddisk, install a new os on it (borrow a cd of a mate and use your own licence).

Once up and running connect the old hd (if it's a ide hd, set it to slave), and see if your pc reconnises any data - if you very lucky and is does then copy your files to the new harddisk and start getting into a backup routine

Reluctant_spender

Can you even boot in to safe mode?

thamesmatt

no, cant get into safe mode.

however got into the setup thing with the screen like an old bbc b and the the hard disk appears to still be listed.

someone told me if I could do that and see the drive then it might not be totally dead. they said if it wasnt listed then it was dead - end of story!

not sure how accurate that is as i am no expert on what goes on inside the pc.

on the other point I havent got a clue how to buy and fit a new hard drive and the only person I know who would is in france for a fortnight!

can I somehow acquire a boot disk from somewhere? I am on my old ancient laptop now so have the ability to download to a memory stick

johnmc

My laptop does this from time to time if left unused. Turn it off and keep trying until it goes into safe mode then do a restart.

Sometimes takes a few goes and is frustrating. First job when back in is to set a restore point and do a backup.

If you've got the operating system disc you may have to run a repair from that.

If you fire the PC up on a Win98 boot disc and you have XP installed it won't recognise the disc (NT file system isn't the same as FAT).

richyrichuk

ok from what u have said, sounds like ur hard drive is not being reconised in DOS propper.

can u take a pic of ur PC screen for me, or write down the EXACT error code. a pic will probs be best. 9.9/10 ur data can be recoverd. very very very rare ur pc fails, and u cant get ur data back. just have to have the know how.

thamesmatt

managed to get my operating system disk to work

gone into windows xp repair and its just given me a dos prompt

c:\>

I have no instructions or anything or how to run anything

tried to remember what I did with my old BBC B typed run or something but it sjust says command not recognised

thamesmatt

the error message is exactly as follows

A disk read error occured
Press Ctrl+Alt +Del to continue

messing about with operating disk, have tried to recover start up and system files. Only other option I have is a full reformat to factory settings which is a big no no!

I hope someone can help with this as i'm getting worried and running out of options now

ixwood

Good old run eh. Had to be worth a try.

ixwood

Sorry, that probably wasn't much help.

Maye ry a proper techie forum. Or I'm sure there'll be some more help arriving soon..

albertross_2

chkdsk c: /F