Dear 4chan BBS I need your help. Recently I had was doing some late night surfing on Youtube.com but it froze on me so I had to force shut it down by depressing the power button on my Dell fro 10 seconds. However, today when I booted up this, the BIOS (with the Dell logo above it) booted up fine but then when the Windows was going to boot up, on a black screen this is what the message said:
"We appologize for the inconvenience, but Windows did not start successfully. A recent hardware or software change might have caused this.
It your computer stopped responding, restarted unexpectedly, or was automaticlly shutdown to protect your files and folder, choose last known good configuration to revet to the most recent settings that worked.
If a previous start up attempt was interrupted due to a power failure or because the powe or reset button was pressed, or if you aren't sure what caused the problem choose start windows normally
SAFE MODE
SAFE MORE WITH NETWORKING
SAFE MORE WITH COMMAND PROMPT
LAST KNOWN GOOD CONFIGURATION (YOURE MOST RECENT SETTING THAT WORKED)
START WINDOWS NORAMLLY
Use the up and down arrow keys to move the highlight to your choice"
That's the message that I have recieved, so far I've tried all the opitions and either one of two things will happen, either:
A) Automaticlly reboot and get back to the same screen
-or-
B) I will see the Window logo and the bar loading but soon after it will revert to the same screen.
Please note the following:
A) I CANNOT AFFORD TO LOSING ANY OF THE INFORMATION ON THE HARD DRIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
B) I did not install ANY new hardware or software.
C) I'm still new to computer lingo so keep the lingo simple for me (a simple guy :D)
D)To prevent future problems, what is a good brand of back up hard drives?
You might try booting with a Windows XP disc (you must set your BIOS to boot from CD). Then you could try using the "recover" option, which as I understand restores the OS only and should leave your files intact. If your Dell came with a recovery disc, those often have the option to try and restore the OS without killing your files.
As for your other question, I believe most people agree that Seagate Hard Drives are pretty reliable. I have one myself, that I use for backup, and have had no problems.
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Anonymous2006-09-17 0:56
Try installing ubuntu and restarting, see if that helps at all.
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Anonymous2006-09-17 1:09
try starting windows with "last know good configuration." it won't hurt anything and it's worth it to try.
I tried that but no luck, it just brings me back to the same screen in a bit. I'm really worried about losing my data, my family has a lot of important stuff on it.
>>10
Hi, >>4 here. Did you try booting from a Windows XP disc? If you don't have one, you can grab a torrent for one in no time flat. This has saved my ass many a time, so I'd strongly advise you at least attempt it.
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Anonymous2006-09-17 17:01
1) Get a Linux LiveCD.
2) Recover any important data.
3) Reinstall Windows.
There are plenty of guides out there to do this. Google is your friend.
I'm betting cutting the power corrupted your filesystem. NTFS doesn't like to be interrupted.
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Shifter2006-09-17 19:44
How do I boot from the CD? Can you give me the step my step process, thank you all for you help. I really appreciate it(minus retarded trolls/flamers)
Once again, I can't afford to lose this information so every bit of info helps
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Anonymous2006-09-17 20:32
1) Download a Linux LiveCD such as Ubuntu or Knoppix. It will almost always be an .iso file.
2) Burn the iso to a CD.
3) With the CD in the drive, reboot your computer. If it still tries to load Windows, you'll need to change the boot order in your CMOS. You can usually get to the CMOS settings by pressing delete, F1, F10, F12, or escape as the machine boots (before it gets to OS stuff). Those seem to be the most common.
4) Once Linux is loaded, you may notice that the NTFS partition is already loaded. From there it should be self expainatory. Most LiveCDs now automatically handle disk mounting, so there shouldn't be anything that really needs explaining. If you run into trouble, fire up a webbrowser from the LiveCD and Google it.
Oh, and I guess I should say that Linux has a different naming scheme for hard disks than Windows. Whatever disk is booted (in this case the CD), becomes root (/). On that disk is a directory called dev (/dev) which contains all the device files. (In Linux, everything is a file, monitors, disks, mice, etc) The first PATA disk on the first PATA controller is hda (/dev/hda), the second PATA disk on the first controller is hdb (/dev/hdb), the first PATA disk on the second controller is hdc (/dev/hdc) and so on. SATA disks start at sda (/dev/sda). The first partition hda is the file /dev/hda1, the second partition is /dev/hda2 and so on. If you try to read or write to, say, /dev/hda or /dev/hda1, you'd be accessing raw blocks. Not very useful. In order to access files, you must first mount it. In a terminal, entering the command "mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows" (without quotes) will make the contents of hda1 available in the directory /mnt/windows. So if there was a directory called win32 on hda1, it would be accessable at /mnt/windows/win32. To see what is mounted, enter the following in a terminal (without quotes): "df -h". To see what disks are available to mount, type "fdisk -l". USB and firewire disks count as SATA and start at sda.
But yeah, most LiveCDs will take care of disks automagically now.
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Anonymous2006-09-18 0:10
bump, because this situation is happening to me. I'm getting to the point where I'll just say "fuck it" and nuke the damned thing
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Anonymous2006-09-18 0:39
>>14
Uh, >>11 here. If you want to try the Windows XP recovery way, follow step 3 of #14's instructions, and look around the settings until you see a section that will have all your devices in order and show you which order they try to boot in. You need to move CD-ROM to the top of this list (instructions will probably be included on screen to do this). Then insert the Windows XP CD and press F10 I believe to save settings & restart. When it retsarts, wait until the screen says "press any key to boot from CD." Press uh, any key. After a bit of loading, it will ask you what you want to do. Carefully read your options, there will be one that says something like "restore-this will keep your files intact" or something similar. Try that one.
If you don't have a Windows XP CD, you should be able to download an ISO from any popular torrent site and burn it with any burning program.
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Anonymous2006-09-21 2:08
But will this kill my data on my hard drive?
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Anonymous2006-09-21 2:09
What about that program I head about File Scavenger? Or other programs? will they save my comp?
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Anonymous2006-09-21 11:54
>>17
Doing what >>14 suggested should be fine, assuming you actually backed up everything.
Most LiveCDs will go right to KDE. From there, you'll want to use K3B, the KDE cd burning program. I use FreeSBIE for my LiveCD needs myself.
Also, in case it matters, >>14 means that all storage media NOT connected right to an ATA (like your IDE harddrives and CD/DVD drives) are considered SCSI, (not SATA). So if it is SCSI, then Linux sees it as SCSI. SATA? It's SCSI. USB? It's SCSI. Firewire (1394)? It's SCSI. If you have say, a SATA drive, a USB flash drive, and a SCSI zip drive (for example), you'd have to access them as sda, sda1, sda2 (though I'd be unable to predict which one would be which)
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j3ph42!dXldY3fJbY2006-09-21 11:55
Oh yeah, another thing to try is a fdisk /mbr, which should only rewrite your MBR.
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Anonymous2006-09-21 12:37
>>19
>you'd have to access them as sda, sdb, sdc
Fixed. And order is determined by whenever the kernel finds them. In this case, the SATA, the SCSI zip, and then the USB flash, usually.
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j3ph42!dXldY3fJbY2006-09-21 15:32
>>21
I assumed I had no idea what order they were connected and picked up by the OS in.
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