Boot Up Problems

[BudsyB]

My pc at home is not booting up into Windows XP. It is the Home Edition of XP and I run it on a Sony machine. What exactly happens is that it starts to boot up, then when it gets to the blue Windowx XP screen it freezes, the mouse still moves but it doesnt get past this screen. I have left it for hours and still no good. I have tried booting from boot disks but no good. I have some pictures of my kids on there which i do not want to lose, any ideas anyone?

Many thanks

Ray

 

[GuyThomas]

Try a fresh 'parallel' installation of XP and recover your data.

Guy Thomas

Scripting Ezine

http://computerperformance.co.uk/ezine/newsletter_subs.htm

 

[BudsyB]

Many thanks for your suggestion Guy, how exactly would I do this?

 

[temporello]

You should start the installation process and choose to repair the existing installation.
So in fact you may not need a 'parallel' installation (which isn't recommended anyway).

 

[BudsyB]

Do I need a Windows XP Home Edition Installation disk or the Sony Recovery disks?

Ray

 

[1101001100110101]

Your recovery disc is probabley your WinXP home disc its just modified by sony to work only with your PC. So the recovery disc should work.

 

[wolluf]

Be careful - the recovery disk may return the machine to the state it was when you bought it (ie, wipe all the data).

Things to try if the disk is not an install disk. You should be able to get into recovery console (

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307654)

using the 6 boot floppies you can download from here

http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm.

From recovery console you could try running chkdsk.

If your filestore is fat32, you can access it from a win98 boot floppy (ie, dos prompt).

If you have access to another machine (which I assuume you do from this post), you could connect your drive as a slave in this machine and then retrieve the pictures (and anything else you want). Could then use the recovery disks.