Broke windows

[John]

Hi,
my youngest has a nasty habit of hitting the off switch on one of my XP
machines and it screws
up the system no end. The PC now boots so far and then does a checkdisk then
bombs out of that without completing it.If I cancel the Chkdsk operation it
boots up to the last screen before desktop and stalls. Is there any kind of
utility I can use to recover this PC as I dont want to go the long way round
by backing up the disk and formatting it. John

 

[Galen]

In John <[email protected]> had this to say:

My reply is at the bottom of your sent message:

Hi,
my youngest has a nasty habit of hitting the off switch on one of
my XP machines and it screws
up the system no end. The PC now boots so far and then does a
checkdisk then bombs out of that without completing it.If I cancel
the Chkdsk operation it boots up to the last screen before desktop
and stalls. Is there any kind of utility I can use to recover this PC
as I dont want to go the long way round by backing up the disk and
formatting it. John

All sorts of options, try the safe mode? Last known good configuration?
Sometimes, when it's like this, just managing to get the system to boot into
safe mode is enough to recover it oddly enough... In order:

Safe Mode :
http://kgiii.info/windows/all/general/safemode.html

Malware Cleaning :
http://www.kgiii.info/windows/all/general/malwarefix.html

Finally:

If worse comes to worse and you don't want to reformat (and you probably
don't have to) then this is the best answer if you can't get in at all after
trying the first two:

How to perform an inplace upgrade (reinstallation) of Windows XP:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;315341

One things, I just noticed the kgiii.info site is down. I've emailed the
hosts and hopefully it will be back up and running before you see this.

Galen
--

"But there are always some lunatics about. It would be a dull world
without them."

Sherlock Holmes

 

[Nog]

Hi,
my youngest has a nasty habit of hitting the off switch on one of my XP
machines and it screws
up the system no end. The PC now boots so far and then does a checkdisk
then bombs out of that without completing it.If I cancel the Chkdsk
operation it boots up to the last screen before desktop and stalls. Is
there any kind of utility I can use to recover this PC as I dont want to
go the long way round by backing up the disk and formatting it. John

Boot your install CD and do a repair if possible. If not possible, format
and reload. Don't touch that power button again until a proper shutdown is
complete.