Won't boot-even in safe mode

In regards to retrieving your pictures:
Check with your friends asking if anyone knows how to safely remove your hard drive and set it up as a slave drive in another computer. The pictures can be retrieved if the drive is ok.

If you want help with the slave setup, please ask.

Thanks for your reply. I don't know anyone that would know about "slave drives" Can you help me with that.?...much appreciated...

I found a posting that was put up by Admin about using the windows xp cd to reestablish former settings...that I may not have to format and loose info. I followed the directions as mentioned and used the Windows XP cd to boot from and all went well until it came to the point where it was searching for previous installed version of windows xp. It just seems to get stuck searching for that....hmmm....my kindof luck!

Thanks for taking the initiative and trying to restore your settings. From the initial description I'm rather surprised how far you got before it got stuck. Oh well, that is another battle. I'll try to help recover your files.

Find a 2nd computer that has plenty of free space on the hard drive.
Before removing your hard drive, note how the cables are connected. Avoid touching the exposed circuit board on the drive, even if you are using an electrostatic strap. The ribbon cable(the wider one) has a red stripe which connects to pin 1 of the drive. Pin 1 is usually 'near' the center of the drive, not at the edge. The red wire of the power supply cable is +5V and will usually be adjacent to the red stripe of the ribbon cable, not near the edge of the drive. The important thing to observe is the relative positions of the red stripe and the red wire. Now the cables can be disconnected. Next look for the master/slave jumper.
If you are lucky it will be near the connector on the drive marked "master slave cs" or something similar("m s c"). Move the jumper to the slave position. Now the drive is ready to install into another pc.
Look for the cable going to the hard drive and cdrom in the test pc. If they share the same ribbon cable, disconnect the cdrom(or other device, could be another drive, dvd,...) and connect your drive to the ribbon and power cables. Position the drive so that it is not going to touch any circuitry in the pc. If all goes well, power on the computer and drag your files to the other hard drive using explore.

Feel free to ask questions if something is unclear. Good luck.

Yikes....that sounds too scary for lame-brain me! Maybe it's time to breakdown and pay a computer service center to help me out.......I hate having to do that! But, I think perhaps, this is beyond my comfort zone....Looks like the computer may win this war......I do not like defeat of da laptop by any means. But, my video clip that is on there is just too valuable to just let this sin....this is such a helpful forum...thank you so much for helping me......
what I don't get is why it gets stuck looking for previous installed version of windows........it sure starts out like the cd is loading programs and files up until that point....aaaarghhhh!!!!!! F R U S T R A T E D!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If you can be patient, perhaps one of the more experinced members can help save your laptop. It sounds like a real challenge, but these guys are good.

Check again with your friends - they may know someone who can help retrieve your clip without spending a lot of money. Whatever you do, do NOT reformat or repartition your drive until you retrieve your files.

Thanks! I will probably have to be patient.....computer repair wasn't quite in the budget.....thanks again for all of your help- and your patience too!

One more try - are you still with us?
I'm not familiar with the process you tried as described in post #4, but if you could provide more details on what worked and detail exactly what happens(error messages, screen/mouse behavior, ...) when it fails, perhaps someone can offer a suggestion or 2 on what you might try next.

This is a hard one.

You will need a converter in order to plug your Laptop hard drive into a desktop PC and the converters do not always work (from my expirence).

I would recommend getting or borrowing an external hard drive and try to copy the files over with a boot disk or in dos. Since the data is very important to you it will be better to spend the extra money to a professional to prevent any data loss.

Also, once you get this fixed make sure you make backups...I learn that the hard way.

Maybe someone here knows a easy way to do this with little risk, but that is all I can really think of. If anything else comes to mind I will post.

If I may offer a few suggestions, insights.

Not sure where you're going with the external harddrive/boot disk in DOS scenario...given this is a windows xp machine, the DOS boot disk won't work since it cannot read NTFS (and more likely than not, the disk was formatted ntfs).

The reason, or likely reason, that you cannot run a repair installation is that your harddrive is damaged (a part of it) and windows cannot corroborate that that you have a previous installation since those files are unreadable.

In a repair scenario, Windows will search for certain files to confirm there was a windows installation that needs to be repaired. The reason that your computer begins to boot, then stops, is that the drive is not completely hosed, and it loads up to the point where it needs those files to continue.

That is actually good news, as it is, since you know your drive is still functioning, and just a portion is damaged. The bad news is the important data may be damaged.

We will cross our fingers and hope not.

Thus far, the best suggestion is to use a converter to plug your notebooks 2.5 inch ide drive into a normal desktop that requires a 3.5 ide drive. A similar solution is an external 2.5 harddrive usb enclosure, which will allow you to insert the notebook drive then hook up to any computer with a USB port running an ntfs aware OS (windows 2000 or XP or mount it in a linux system, but we probably do not want to go there.)
Such adapters/converters or HD enclosures run anywhere from $15 to $30.

Another alternative, and this is what I would choose, is to build a Bart Preinstallation Environment boot disk. This is an extraordinarily useful tool to have around.

Here is a link

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

You will need the PEBuilder form the above link, a second computer, and a windows xp disk.

With it, you can build a bootable disk that will run windows xp from a CD. With that, you can access your harddrive, and if connected to a network, you can move your files safely to another machine.

With a little more work, you can actually build a Bart's PE that will burn CDs from your laptop (assuming your laptop has a burner).

If you choose this option, boot your laptop and the folders/files are hopelessly corrupt, you may still be able to retrieve the lost data with a datarecovery program provided you do not write anything to the disk. Maybe.

First, though, do you understand everything so far?

HI, i have exactly the same problem... i have managed to get a hold of a lead to connect my laptop hard drive to my PC. however, my laptop is on XP and my PC is on windows 2000.. will this cause any problems
also which pins does the powersupply connect to.

#TX

I had the exact same problem and symptoms, I found a post on this site
after searching on google for "windows xp won't boot". That took me to
geekstogo.com and the article on "Repair windows xp, how to perform
an inplace upgrade"
I was able to repair windows and keep all my data on the hard drive..and
cancel a repair service I called which would have cost $200...

Thanks
Geekstogo

it is an old post i see, but still visible and useful.
My experience:
got big problems when downloading from emule, which was not what was supposed to be...

I installed everything (AV, AR, adware, antistuff...). Used RC.

No way to get Safe Boot back, no way at all

i solved it with this: http://www.moonvalle...?products_id=29

7$ and it worked.