Can't boot win xp sp2

[Guest]

After upgrading from win98 to winxp sp2 a few months ago I was progressivly
having increased slowdowns and started having lockup problems. I think it was
heat related and I was taking steps to try to resolve this. However now my
comp. locked up and was rebooted. Now the old win98 startup menu comes up and
the files for reboot appear to be missing and the computer will not reboot. I
tried to put in the winxp disk and perform a recovery but it will not work.
It appears my only otion may be to install winxp again.

If I install xp again from the cd, will I lose information on my hard drive?

Any other suggestions for this problem?

 

[Rich Barry]

Bubbles, don't peform a clean install of WinXP which is formatting the
hard drive and removing all data. Try a Repair Install first. You will have
to enter the BIOS and set the cdrom drive as first boot device. This is
usually accomplished by
tapping on the Del or F2 key while starting up. You can find the
information in your Computer Manual. Check at Michael's
site for more info on Repair Install
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

 

[Guest]

Thamks Rich, I'll give it a shot

Bubbles, don't peform a clean install of WinXP which is formatting the
hard drive and removing all data. Try a Repair Install first. You will have
to enter the BIOS and set the cdrom drive as first boot device. This is
usually accomplished by
tapping on the Del or F2 key while starting up. You can find the
information in your Computer Manual. Check at Michael's
site for more info on Repair Install
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

 

[Guest]

It appears as though I will have to do a clean install. When I try to do a
repair install a message comes up saying that the disk is damaged or ?. It
wants to format the partition.
Is there a way to retreive the files from this disk before I do this?
Can it be removed and hooked to another computer?
Any other suggestions?

Thank You

 

[Rich Barry]

Sure, you can connect your drive to another PC and retrieve files that way.
Or, if you have cable or dsl ( it is a very large file to download ) you can
use a Knoppix Live CD. You can get
one here www.distrowatch.com A slight learning curve but worth it.
Check here
http://www.help2go.com/Tutorials/LinuxUNIX/Why_Every_Windows_User_Needs_a_Linux_Live_CD.html