Big problems

[Guest]

My daughter's laptop seems to have gotten corrupted. Last week we tried to
do a backup image and it stopped half-way through.

Now, it takes about 5-6 minutes to boot up, and her "profile" is missing -
most programs are there, but for example, the wireless connection is gone,
screensaver is gone, wallpaper is gone, windows media player gone, etc.

I attribute this to spyware (without any real justification).

Anyway, I thought possibly there was nothing I could do other than format
the drive and start over, so I thought I'd copy some music and pictures onto
an external hard drive first. I ran a search of *.mp3 and it came up with 60
files. When I went to copy/move them (same message in either case), it said
they couldn't be moved because the source file couldn't be located. I'm not
sure what that means, since they appeared following the search.

Does anyone have any advice short of wiping out everything and starting over?

 

[Road Runner]

Hi ... Do you see the drive for your external hard drive ??

 

[Guest]

Can you recover from the previous backup?

 

[Guest]

Yes I can. I tried to copy music, videos and pictures. It appears that the
pictures are fine (jpegs) but that the music and videos are all corrupted.
So I don't think it's the connection with the external hard drive that's the
problem.

 

[Guest]

I cannot because it never completed (half-way through saving, it gave me some
corruption message, which I think was related to the fact that the music and
videos on her computer seem to be corrupted).

I'm not sure if I said in my original post that the sound is gone from her
computer, too.

 

[Guest]

Good luck! The same thing happened to me after I installed SP2 update for XP
PRO, and the installation apparently finished off my 13 month old harddrive
on my Toshiba laptop. After many attempts over several days, the computer
gods smiled and gave me several hours of access to the HD, and I was able to
copy my most important files before it died completely, and required
replacement.

 

[Rock]

Good luck! The same thing happened to me after I installed SP2 update for XP
PRO, and the installation apparently finished off my 13 month old harddrive
on my Toshiba laptop. After many attempts over several days, the computer
gods smiled and gave me several hours of access to the HD, and I was able to
copy my most important files before it died completely, and required
replacement.

<snip>

SP2 didn't kill your hard drive. It failed on its own.