Pete said:
Running XP on a dell laptop. It will not come up in
normal or safe mode. I would like to get to the C
prompt. Any help would be appreciated.
You can get to a c: prompt by booting up to your XP installation CD that
DELL gave you. If at bootup you don't get an option to boot to CD, hit your
F12 key for bootup options and select CD drive. At the main screen, click
on R for Recovery Console. You would then probably have to hit a 1 to
choose your XP OS selection. It then ask for your Administrator account
password. If no password is set, just hit enter and you are there. Keep in
mind that this is not DOS and so not all old DOS commands will work. You
can see a list of available commands by typing help. Also, you cannot
browse your complete drive but will have access to most of it.
Description of the Windows XP Recovery Console:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;314058&Product=winxp
You may want to perform a repair installation of XP. To do so, again bootup
to your CD and at the main menu hit enter to setup Windows. After hitting
F8 to accept the license agreement, hit R to repair the installation. This
may repair your problem and you should not lose any data or have to
reinstall nay programs afterwards.
Good Luck
