Problem XP laptop won't load, reboots repeatedly

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I currently have my cousins laptop looking at because yesterday she had a message come up saying something about spyware and deleting and the laptop shut down, when its booted up it comes up with the black screen saying it hasn't been shut down properly and to select one of the 3 safe mode options, last known good config or start normally, if any of the safe modes or last know config are selected the laptop reboots, if start normally is selected the windows xp screen is shown then it reboots.

My first priority is to recover all of her pictures from the machine as she has pics from when her little girl was born up to current day which is about 6 years i think so a lot of pics.

I have got a BartPE bootable environment on a disc which I have loaded up but when I go into the file management utility it lists the usual my computer and network places.

In my computer there is 2 drives shown. A RAMdisc drive which the properties says is a 31.9MB drive and only has 21KB stored on it and the file system lists FAT, the other drive is C which it scarily lists as having nothing on and no capacity and lists the file type as RAW. To me this sounds like the C drive is unformatted and empty.

Is this game over for retrieving the pics and also for getting the laptop back running?

Any ideas will be greatly appreciated

 

Thanks for the reply sparky,
Its weird that it doesn't show in the BartPE system though isn't it?
Is their any other way of getting in on the actual machine? My XP on my PC is only OE so I don't have a disc else I was going to try and create a bootable XP, that said theres no option to boot from USB on the laptop so might not have been able to anyways.

 

Ill give that a go sparky, thanks.

Just to add to the mix, I have just opened the command prompt and it focuses on the X drive as thats where the BartPE is running from but if i type in C: it says The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable

 

Is it the true image software i'm after?

 

i would caddy it and see what you can see from there. If nothing then get data recovery utility and scan it. I've used to getdataback and it worked a treat.

 

Have you tried booting from a knoppix disc, and browsing the drive that way? Always worth a try.

 

I'll try them both lol, at present I am running chkdsk which BartPE included, it seems to be finding files, hopefully this won't make things worse. But I am downloading acronis and looking into knoppix at the minute as well.

 

just though i'd add another vote for it

 

Update.

The CHKDSK in BartPE keeps causing a BSOD at 52% of stage 4 of 5,
I have run the Knoppix disc and seemed to be able to access the folders and it appears also the pics, I am just installing Acronis now to see what the disc for that gives me, should go bed really but am a bit obsessive when something isn't fixed yet lol

 

If that doesn't work, whip the drive out and do what Daniel suggests, ie stick it in a USB caddy.. i did exactly that a couple of hours ago to retrieve data off one of my own boxes when the hard drive spat the dummy.

 

Well acronis only seemed to be able to make a back up or restore one.
I'm going to buy a USB hard drive tonight to back the data up onto, but as regards connecting her hard drive to my pc, do I Have to have a dock or can I just buy a cable and connect it to my motherboard? Her hard drive is an EIDE according to western digital whereas most docks seem to be sata. Maplin do an IDE to laptop IDE cable for connecting laptop drives to a pc, would this be ok?

 

yep get the PC IDE to Laptop IDE.

good luck

 

I use one of these: http://www.cdlmicro.co.uk/html/show_product.php/pid/526

For jobs like this, sure I got mine cheaper than that but I can't for the life of me remember where from.

 

Do you think this would do the trick? http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=35057
the IDE to laptop IDE cable is £6 i don't mind paying a bit more for something that will basically allow me to use it on any hard drive

 

Few things to try,

A) Repair install
B) Shrink the Partiton (should be something on the hiren boot cd to do this) then load XP onto the other part and boot into that
C) Boot to recovery console, do a cacls "c:\system volume information" /E /G yourusername:F then
cd into a system restore snapshot R1,R2,R3 etc and rename the, SAM, SOFTWARE, SYSTEM, SECURITY, DEFAULT files to what i have just written and copy those 5 files into c:|windows\system32\config

copy xxxx c:\windows\system32\config\software

etc..

This will restore the system restore reg settings into the system

It's probably not a registry problem but a last resort.

It's more likely a driver problem.

I would go for puppy linux and try and delete the graphics driver manually from there.