Dell XPS 400 running Windows XP Home Edition. The computer was running
great
until this afternoon. My wife left it on and my 2-year-old got to the
keyboard. When I found it, some of the icons were moved around but
nothing
looked bad. I tried to shut it down normally and it locked up, hard. I
finally had to cut power and try to reboot. Thats when the problem began.
I'm running Windows Defender Beta, Symantec and PC Tools for malware. I
tried
reinstalling Windows but the installer said that it couldn't detect a hard
drive. Pretty much stuck now.
Ok try a chkdsk from the recovery console. First off do you have a backup
of the important data on the system? If not do that now. There are a
couple of ways to do this. One is to install the drive in another XP or
Windows 2000 computer as a slave drive and copy the important data. Another
is to do a parallel install of XP to different partition on that drive, then
backup the data. A third way is to use a Linux distro on a bootable CD and
copy the data. Let us know if you need info on the third and hopefully
Malke will see this and respond.
Once the data is backed up boot from the XP installation CD and enter the
Recovery Console. Take the first "R" for repair. Type in the # for the
windows installation, normally "1", and then enter the password for the
built in Administrator account. Since it's XP Home the password might be
unset so just hit enter or tab.
If that gets you in to the command prompt do chkdsk /p.
Then reboot and see if it runs.