Messed up harddrive- Need help quick!

  • Thread starter Thread starter rory mckavney
  • Start date Start date
R

rory mckavney

Hi,

Im running XP home upgraded from ME
I installed 'steam' (a new program from Valve to update
games) and halfway thru updating Counterstrike the power
got cut!
when i turned my PC back on it was messed up and did
things ive never seen it do before!
after several restarts (that the PC did on its own
accord) xp MANAGED to get inself back to nearly normal.
I ran scandisk and it said some files were missing or
corrupt but it was late and i turned it off and went to
bed (baaaaaad mistake).
then in the morning i turned on my PC and after loading
the usual DOS screens it went black and a minute later it
said 'Windows cannot load because the file hal.dll is
missing or corrupt'
so i grabbed this file from my laptop (which im on now-
its running xp home that it came with)
then i loaded a dos boot diskette that you can make from
the format menu of the floppy disk, and realised that it
only lets you access the A: drive. no matter how many
times i punched in C: it would not change. i tried loads
of different combinations and all it says is 'Invalid
drive specification'
then i tried installing a proper version of dos from my
old diskettes and stopped when i realised that it formats
the drive!
I can re-install windows but first i need to backup some
important files! Assuming that my hardrive is still
intact how can i do this, and if its not i still need
these files!
My 60gb harddrive is in 2 partitions in NTFS format.

HELP!
 
use your windows xp cd rom to boot into recovery mode and restore the files
that way, you can not access NTFS drives from a DOS boot
 
rory said:
thx, but my computer does not boot the disk drive only
the floppy on startup!
what do i do now?
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!





and restore the files
Click to expand...

You need to, via a BIOS setting, change the order in which the computer
searches the drives for bootable disks. When the machine starts it
should give you a message about what key to press to turn on Setup.
Often it's the ESC or F8 key or something (different on different
machines). Go into BIOS setup and find the boot-up order. Put the CD
Drive ahead of the flopy and ahead of the C: hard drive.
 
hey again,

ive used partition magic and found that my C: partition
containing windows is corrupt (it seems to have filled
from 15GB to its limit of around 28GB)
but my D: is fine.
Ids there any way of recovering these files that i need?
im thinking of hooking up the harddrive with an external
IDE hardrive thingy to my laptop and try to recover them
from there. is there another way?
i need to know all possible ways of recovering this files!

thanks for your help so far!

p.s. its kinda stupid that you need to put in a key for
windows help and the only way to find this key is to use
my wrecked computer! lol.
 
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