Windows won't start...strange scenario...

[Guest]

I come into work this morning and a guy in the office tells me he can't get
his laptop to boot up at all. When you fire it up it does show the XP Pro
startup screen but before you ever see the desktop at all it blue screens and
reboots itself too quickly for me to read the BSOD error. It will run in
this continuous loop forever if I let it.

I began to do a repair install, however, when I get into where it shows the
current installations and my drive setup it's simply showing Partition1, as
if it hasn't been partitioned and formatted yet. So, it's not even giving me
the option to do a repair install.

The repair with recovery console option was there...but I've never used that
before. What exactly is it and is this a case where I would use it? There is
data on the drive that we'd rather not lose if at all possible. But without
being able to do a repair install I don't know how I'd do it.

Any information on this matter would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

[Rick \Nutcase\ Rogers]

Hi,

Last time I saw that happen it was a corrupted partition and everything was
lost. Remove the drive and image it, then work on the image to see if you
can recover data from it. Tools like testdisk from cgsecurity.org and
mbrwork from terabyteunlimited.com may be able to help you recover the
partition information on the drive.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Associate Expert - WindowsXP Expert Zone

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org