Operating System Failure

[Jay Curtis]

My windows XP Professional is screwed up. Upon rebooting
it went into a loop and upon the phase where it
loads "personal preferences" it stops and reboots
repeatedly, never getting to the final loading of
programs. I decided like an idiot to reload Windows XP
(tried booting from CD but it began loading XP but
wouldn't finish. I took it to CompUSA and asked them to
remove all my files from C drive to my D drive and then
reload Windows XP for me on C drive and only reformat C
AFTER salvaging my C data files. Like an idiot I didn't
back up my data files (not for over a year). I was told
my them that by attempting to reload Windows XP on my
computer it reformatted my C harddrive and the data is
lost. This does't sound logical as my XP was an upgrade
and it would not destroy my files under the former
Windows 2000 professional operating program. Is this
true what they said? Can I take the C drive out and
connect it to another computer as a slave harddrive and
still have my data files to copy to another drive ? Or
am I totally screwed. Anyone got an answer. HELP me
please.

Jay

 

[Dr Evil]

You're screwed. Here's why - sounds like CompUSA have
reformatted the hard drive, which is wiping it clean and
the reinstalling the o/s - one interesting point is that
unless you have the full o/s you need to have Win98 2000
etc already on to upgrade you can't use the upgrade disk
to reinstall...... Not sure what you mean by D drive, is
this a separate partition of your hard drive? If it is
CompUSA have not listened to your request. Sounds like
you might like to talk to them......

 

[Guest]

Not so fast Dr. Evil, I know this is a little unorthodox
but if you are able to lay your hands on a copy of Barts
PE you can boot from the CD and see the NTFS file system
on your hard drive you may be able to copy your files to
another drive IF they still exist. If you went through
all the formatting prior to the install of XP (the second
one that you tried) CompUSA may be right.