win2k hangs upon boot

[mike]

I am using a Dell Precision M50 laptop with Win2k Pro, sp4
on it. I was using defrag, when the system shut off. Now
I can't get back in. I have tried booting to safe-mode,
Last Known Good, Directory Services mode, etc, etc. and
they all hang up. It gets past the Dell screen, and the
screen that allows you to hit f8 for startup options, but
hangs on the Win 2k startup screen. The status bar gets
filled, and the scroll bar keeps scrolling, but it never
gets past that. I tried booting of the Win2k cd, and
tried to repair, but it hung up. I also tried a fresh
install, but that hung up.

I am out of ideas. Any information would be
helpful..Thanks.

 

[Steve Parry [MVP]]

I am using a Dell Precision M50 laptop with Win2k Pro, sp4
on it. I was using defrag, when the system shut off. Now
I can't get back in. I have tried booting to safe-mode,
Last Known Good, Directory Services mode, etc, etc. and
they all hang up. It gets past the Dell screen, and the
screen that allows you to hit f8 for startup options, but
hangs on the Win 2k startup screen. The status bar gets
filled, and the scroll bar keeps scrolling, but it never
gets past that. I tried booting of the Win2k cd, and
tried to repair, but it hung up. I also tried a fresh
install, but that hung up.

I am out of ideas. Any information would be
helpful..Thanks.

If it won't do a fresh install it may be that the hard drive has failed?

try running the ibm hitachi drive test on it (many Dells have IBM
drives)

http://www.softpedia.com/public/cat/13/8/13-8-52.shtml

 

[Rick Lewis]

How long did you leave it to hang? is there any hdd
activity ? it maybe having trouble reading a sector, if
it's still unresponsive after an hour it looks like a
format/reload job.

Rick Lewis [MCP]

 

[mike]

If it were a harddrive failure, wouldn't it have trouble
even locating the operating system? How would it get that
far into booting into Win2k? That's why I figured it
wasn't harddrive related.

I will try the IBM utility. If not, I will try another
harddrive, although hopefully I don't lose all the info.
on there!

Thanks.

 

[Steve Parry [MVP]]

If it were a harddrive failure, wouldn't it have trouble
even locating the operating system? How would it get that
far into booting into Win2k? That's why I figured it
wasn't harddrive related.

I will try the IBM utility. If not, I will try another
harddrive, although hopefully I don't lose all the info.
on there!

Thanks.

There is a key sequence that can be pressed on many Dells to initiate a
built in drive diagnostic but I'm afraid I cannot recall what it is.
Perhaps a call to Dell support would help?

 

[mike]

I ran the diagnostics cd included with the laptop. It
reports the harddrive as just fine. It found no errors at
all. I did contact Dell, and after having me try
everything I did, they said they would send me a new
harddrive. However, I travel for work quite a bit, and
have a lot on there that hasn't been backed up yet. Given
the diagnostics don't report errors, I figured it wasn't a
harddrive issue, but I'm guessing.

Looks like I'll be rebuilding. What's the chance Dell
will try to recover my data off the old one???

Thanks again for the responses.

 

[Steve Parry [MVP]]

I ran the diagnostics cd included with the laptop. It
reports the harddrive as just fine. It found no errors at
all. I did contact Dell, and after having me try
everything I did, they said they would send me a new
harddrive. However, I travel for work quite a bit, and
have a lot on there that hasn't been backed up yet. Given
the diagnostics don't report errors, I figured it wasn't a
harddrive issue, but I'm guessing.

Looks like I'll be rebuilding. What's the chance Dell
will try to recover my data off the old one???

Thanks again for the responses.


What's the chance Dell
will try to recover my data off the old one???

Bwahahahhahahah .... I think you know the answer to that one Mike )

 

[Guest]

did you try booting from a cd -rom with a bootdisk image? (ntldr, boot.ini ,enz) then let win2k look for your bootfiles in the winnt map.

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

I am using a Dell Precision M50 laptop with Win2k Pro, sp4
on it. I was using defrag, when the system shut off. Now
I can't get back in. I have tried booting to safe-mode,
Last Known Good, Directory Services mode, etc, etc. and
they all hang up. It gets past the Dell screen, and the
screen that allows you to hit f8 for startup options, but
hangs on the Win 2k startup screen. The status bar gets
filled, and the scroll bar keeps scrolling, but it never
gets past that. I tried booting of the Win2k cd, and
tried to repair, but it hung up. I also tried a fresh
install, but that hung up.

I am out of ideas. Any information would be
helpful..Thanks.

Seeing that you probably have to rebuild your system,
you have a few options to salvage your data:
- Restore the data from backup. If you never backed
up your important files then consider this event as
an irritating but useful learning exercise.
- Get a $10.00 adapter, install your laptop disk as a
slave disk in some other Win2000 PC, then copy
your files to another disk.
- Get the free code for a Bart Boot CD from
http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/#download. If you have
access to another Win2000 PC with a CD burner,
and to a WinXP Professional CD, then you can roll
your own WinXP boot CD. Use it to reboot your laptop
and to save your files to some other location.