I had just reformatted windows and was in the middle of reinstalling my AIW 9800 drivers to the newest version, while in the middle of the reinstall, my home's power tripped, and the computer rebooted.

Now, whenever I try to start up windows, it gets stuck on the windows XP loading screen while the little blue bar just keeps moving.

I've tried booting up in safe mode, and it loads to agp440.sys and freezes.

I've tried the windows recovery console with chkdsk /r and that doesn't help, and I've tried repairing windows with the windows CD, and that hasn't done anything to help the situation either.

I really can't afford to reinstall windows fresh though because I had moved some really important documents onto the hard drive and I'd like to recover them before I reinstall windows again.

Does anyone know if I could use knoppix, and transfer the files onto my iPod? I thought of that but for some reason knoppix doesn't recoginize the drives as a recognizable format. Any idea of how i can at least get into safe mode and recover some files before another reformat?

Edit: Try the solution here first.

Is your hard drive formatted with NTFS or FAT32? Linux doesn't really support NTFS.
If you have another hard drive, you could use your bad one as slave and copy the files off it. I had a somewhat similar problem, and I thought about shrinking my paritition with Knoppix, installing XP on it, then copying the files over, but I didn't have enough free space. You could try it if you want, but there is always a chance of lost data when you shrink a partition.

This post has been edited by Pi rules: Nov 6 2005, 06:21 PM

If you cannot get it to run with the method in the above post, though you should, here are some more options

Try here for system restore from command prompt

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...kb;en-us;304449

To recover a corrupt registry

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...kb;en-us;307545

Beyond those, you could install the drive to another PC as the slave, back up the data, wipe the drive and re-install

As this happened as the result of a power failure it could have upset the drive to the point where using the drive manufacturer's set up utillity will be the better option. The set up utility will have a write zero's to drive option, use the full, not quick type

If you cannot find the utility, or it does not have write zero's to drive, post back