c: drive in ms-dos invalid drive specification

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So I've been having trouble with this laptop of mine for a week now. I opened it up to fix the touch pad. Carefully replaced everything and started it up and it give me the "we apologize for the inconvience....restart in safe mode...last known setting...windows normally" I've tried all of these with no luck. When starting windows normally or last known setting it goes to the windows logo screen...waits there a while and then the screen flickers and then goes black the hard disk LED which is lit through this, turns off but I hear something coming from that general area as if the laptop is still on. When I try loading in safe mode, a bunch of drivers scroll down the screen and then the same thing...flickers and screen goes black. Nothing brings any picture back. I tried reinstalling xp home ed with the 6 boot disks (SP1) but on the third disk it gives me error msg 4099...setupreg.hiv could not be found. So I tried an MS-DOS boot up and it of course gives me the a:\> prompt. When I type C:, it say invalid drive specification. I'm at a loss here, I was really hoping not to give it to a professional rip-off who charges $XX/hr as I'm a poor man. Is there a way to fix my computer's state? I NEED to get these files that are trapped in my computer for a research project that I'm working on. If I run Fdisk will this help, or will it erase the important files on my hard drive. Help is desperately needed...Thank you for your time
 
Tom said:
So I've been having trouble with this laptop of mine for a week now. I opened it up to fix the touch pad. Carefully replaced everything and started it up and it give me the "we apologize for the inconvience....restart in safe mode...last known setting...windows normally" I've tried all of these with no luck. When starting windows normally or last known setting it goes to the windows logo screen...waits there a while and then the screen flickers and then goes black the hard disk LED which is lit through this, turns off but I hear something coming from that general area as if the laptop is still on. When I try loading in safe mode, a bunch of drivers scroll down the screen and then the same thing...flickers and screen goes black. Nothing brings any picture back. I tried reinstalling xp home ed with the 6 boot disks (SP1) but on the third disk it gives me error msg 4099...setupreg.hiv could not be found. So I tried an MS-DOS boot up and it of course gives me the a:\> prompt. When I type
C:, it say invalid drive specification. I'm at a loss here, I was really hoping not to give it to a professional rip-off who charges $XX/hr as I'm a poor man. Is there a way to fix my computer's state? I NEED to get these files that are trapped in my computer for a research project that I'm working on. If I run Fdisk will this help, or will it erase the important files on my hard drive. Help is desperately needed...Thank you for your time.
Click to expand...

It sounds like your laptop's hard drive is using the NTFS file system,
and that is why you cannot access the drive using a regular DOS boot
disk.

If you use FDISK to make any changes to the hard drive you will wipe
out the existing contents of the drive completely and it will cost you
thousands of dollars to recover the files.

There is a way to recover files, especially a relatively small
quantity of files, from an NTFS hard drive but it does require some
familiarity with DOS commands and with the general concept of files
and directories/folders. However if there is more than 50 mb or so of
files that must be recovered then this procedure will probably be too
cumbersome to be practicable.

Post a response back here if you would like detailed instructions for
recovering these files.

And that will still leave the problem of getting your laptop back into
operation. I suspect that you may have inadvertently dislodged or
damaged something during your touchpad repairs and the computer may
therefore require the "hands on" attention of a qualified hardware
technician.

Good luck



Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much."
 
Thanks for the reply, I would appreciate any tips you can give me on recovering files. Yes, it is more than 50mb...more like 12Gig. These are chemical modeling software and project files as well as some important word, powerpt, pdf, avi documents. I'm so mad at myself...I should have just bought a mouse and hooked that up. Anyways, any suggestions are greatly appreciated.
 
Tom said:
Thanks for the reply, I would appreciate any tips you can give me on recovering files. Yes, it is more than 50mb...more like 12Gig. These are chemical modeling software and project files as well as some important word, powerpt, pdf, avi documents. I'm so mad at myself...I should have just bought a mouse and hooked that up. Anyways, any suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Click to expand...

You will need:

1. A desktop computer running Windows XP.
2. A special adapter to allow a notebook 2.5 inch hard drive to be
installed in a desktop computer. WARNING!!!!! Some of these
adapters can be tricky to connect up and getting the connection
oriented wrong can result in a fried drive.
3. Enough space on the desktop hard drive to hold the files you want
to save.

Remove the hard drive from the laptop and install it into the desktop
computer using the 2.5 inch to 3.5 inch drive adapter. Connect the
drive as the Master drive on the Secondary IDE channel, most likely by
using the data cable and power lead from the desktop's CDROM drive.

Boot up the desktop computer. It should detect the laptop hard drive
and assign it a drive letter.

You can then use Windows Explorer to copy the files you need to the
desktop machine's hard drive.

Good luck


Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much."
 
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