I have a Presario V4000 laptop that refuses to boot, it keeps bringing up the safe mode options yet none of them work and a BSOD screen appears very briefly (too briefly to read what it says, just a flash of blue in fact but I recognise that shade anywhere) then it restarts.
At first the DVDROM drive didn't work but I took it out and popped it back together and it seems to be working again most of the time.
I've whacked in a XP Home CD (Royalty OEM if that's important) in order to do a repair install but that option doesn't appear, just the one to reinstall grrr. So i've been on the recovery console which does detect the Windows installation but not enough to repair it using bootcfg, i've also tried fixboot and fixmbr just to be on the safe side. I've chkdsk it using /R /P and also scanned the hard drive for faults using a seperate piece of software.
I'm pretty sure the hard drive isn't faulty anyway just the Windows installation.
I'd rather not reinstall cause I don't wanna format the drive and lose the data as it's not mine, i've just been roped in to fix it lol. So I haven't a clue what they were doing previously that might have caused this fault.
Also as it's a laptop I can't take out the drive and stick it in a desktop or something to extract the data off the drive.
So far my only alternative is to try and reinstall over the top possibly losing user settings which I'd also rather not do unless I have no other choice but I'm out of ideas so any other offers on this one??
Cheers :-)