Booting from CD problems

B

BCMoney

n00b
Joined
Nov 4, 2003
Messages
3
Good day,
I don't know if this particular problem belongs on this board, but it seemed pretty general to me. At my job, I've got this computer with some very important files on it and yesterday it wouldn't boot. It gets to the initial WinXP screen but then a blue warning screen flashes and it reboots. I've run PowerMax on the drive and everything seems OK. So, I took the drive out and set it as a slave on another computer, but it wouldn't recognize the drive in Windows. So then I put it back in the original case and tried to boot from my WinXP install cd so that I could try to repair the windows install, but it would not boot the CD. I tried 3 different copies of the install disk, and none of them would boot. After I set the CD-Rom to boot before the HDD, it just acted as though I hadn't done anything and skipped the CD boot and went right for the HDD. I'm wondering if I'm overlooking something, or if someone knows a better way of getting the files off the HDD.
Thank you very much
 
What exactly is the error message given on the BSOD? If it gives you a problem regarding "volume mounting," then you indeed might have a problem. I had that error before and tried to repair it through WinXP repair (using the bootdisk), and failed. I eventually had to reformat and I was never able to recover the data. If you can't fix the problem (using practically all available methods), and the files are /really/ important, then you can use harddrive recovery (offered by some companies), and they hopefully can recover those files for you. Like what I said though, it is very pricey so you have to consider the valuableness of your data.
 
Ghosting the drive in RAW mode to a server always works for me.
 
Check the bios and see if the IDE channels are set to Auto-detect. I usually turn the ones that have the CD-rom drives off in order to speed up booting (windows finds them anyway), but this also disables booting from cds.

I'm not sure, but when you tried mouting the drive in another computer, was that also winXP? Security and NTFS might have something to do with not being able to see the drive.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top