System boot and repair install problem...please help!

  • Thread starter Thread starter Patrick A.
  • Start date Start date
P

Patrick A.

My computer is giving the "We're sorry for the inconvenience, but
Windows did not start successfully," message on startup. None of the
options I'm given on that screen work.

I was about to try a repair install, but I'm getting a message that
"The partition is either too full, damaged or formateed with an
incompatible file system." It says in order to continue installing
Windows, the setup has to format the drive. Well, I don't want the
damn drive formatted...that defeats the purpose of the repair install!

If someone has any idea of what I can do to get the files off my
computer that I need, I would appreciate it. I've got a lot of baby
pictures, documents and songs that I need/want to keep...but don't
know how to get them if XP won't let me in. And I'm strapped for cash,
so taking it to an expert is preferably a last resort.

Thanks in advance.
 
My computer is giving the "We're sorry for the inconvenience, but
Windows did not start successfully," message on startup. None of the
options I'm given on that screen work.

I was about to try a repair install, but I'm getting a message that
"The partition is either too full, damaged or formateed with an
incompatible file system." It says in order to continue installing
Windows, the setup has to format the drive. Well, I don't want the
damn drive formatted...that defeats the purpose of the repair install!

If someone has any idea of what I can do to get the files off my
computer that I need, I would appreciate it. I've got a lot of baby
pictures, documents and songs that I need/want to keep...but don't
know how to get them if XP won't let me in. And I'm strapped for cash,
so taking it to an expert is preferably a last resort.

Thanks in advance.
Click to expand...


Sounds like a bad hard drive or a faulty sector on it. Were you able
to scan the disk for errors? If you have a boot disk to get into dos,
you can run "chkdsk /f" to fix any problems with it. If you ran a
disk check and no errors were reported, then it sounds like you have
physical damage to the hard drive somewhere, in which case you're
somewhat out of luck. However, there is software out there that can
recover damaged disks.
 
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