Dell desktop hibernated, won't wake or reboot

[z]

I have a Dell 4100 desktop with a few months old WD 120 gig hard drive
(and a new CPU fan), upgraded to XP with all the latest MS fixes
automatically updated via the web. It clunks along OK, the hard drive
for sure never had any problems. I keep it defragged.

Yesterday, trying to restart it, it went into hibernate mode somehow (I
didn't click on the option, I don't even know if it displays); anyway,
it won't wake up, even if I unplug it and let it sit for a few hours
then plug it in. I get "Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart" which just
brings me back again. I've checked the bios setup and it is set for the
correct hard disk.

I have a bootable floppy (spinrite from gibson research) and that boots
OK. (spinrite doesn't want to try to fix the disk, says the partition
is bigger than the disk physical size). I can boot from the XP upgrade
CD and tried to repair the old XP installation, but it didn't help. I
tried running chkdsk from the repair console (text mode interface)
booted off the CD, no difference. I didn't try a full install of XP,
because I didn't want to overwrite all my documents and stuff.

I don't care about saving anything that got hibernated, I just want it
to boot. I don't need it to be able to hibernate in the future, being a
desktop and all, I just want it to come back to life now and not lose
everything on the disk. Is there a way to short circuit the hibernation
so it just plain reboots? I can see the hibernate.sys file in the root
directory, from the repair console. Can I just delete it?

 

[lillekurt]

I would boot a BartPE-CD and copy all important files to some USBdevice.
Supposing you cannot find anybody with such a CD, you could make one
yourself on another PC.
BartPE is a primitive XPversion which is able to boot without accessing your
hard drive.
www.nu2.nu/pebuilder