Major help needed regarding windows not booting BCD errors!

[ryanwalmsley]

Hi everyone,

Thankyou for taking the time to read but I am having a complete crisis at the moment!

I am a university student in my final year and my dissetation is completed on my computer and I can't access it!

My first goal is obviously to retrieve this in time but i also have a very expensive (for a student!) computer I want to save!

Without further adieu here is my problem..

 

I have a AMD Phenom quad-core processer with 4gb DDR2 RAM and a 1TB HDD. However, for some strange reason whenever I choose to do a defragment or leave the pc (which is running win7) idle for 15 mins it chooses to freeze! more specifically it actually responds to the mouse moving and clicking however programs don't open/close when i ask them to, I click the start button, hit the arrow and try and click 'restart' but its not registering the mouse is over it! its a nightmare!

 

Eventually I got sick of this, tried EVERYTHING, including safe mode and using smart defrag 2, formatting the hard disk, checking for inconsistancies the whole works. Eventually I got so fustrated I stumbled accross a website and it said I should open cmd and run some lines of code, which I stupidly did.

 

When I chose to restart the computer however, windows now fails to boot! I get the usual \boot\bcd error along with the code 0xc00000034 and after investigation I realise my only way of fixing this is to insert my installation disc and click 'repair computer'

 

This is where it gets really tricky..

 

the desktop I have was originally designed and produced for running vista.. however at the time I bought it 7 was out so Acer offered me a free upgrade to 7.. since then I have thrown the installation disk away (SO stupid of me) so now i'm thinking the only way to salvage this computer is take out my internal hard drive transfer my precious files onto another computer and then do a factory restore through the BIOS/before it boots windows.

 

However I have no idea how to do this! before windows trys to boot i press F8 and it doesn't have any of it and goes straight to the error screen.. however I can press delete to enter setup or F12 as well.

 

Could some kind gentleman/gentlelady PLEASE tell me how to do a factory restore on my acer if it is even possible or provide me with ANY useful links!?

my desktop is an Acer Aspire AX1300 if this is needed!

 

Any help would be much appreciated!

Thanks,

Ryan!

[KenB]

Hi Ryan and welcome to ExTS

 

When you say that you ran some code from the command prompt ( cmd )

was the chkdsk /f ?

 

As you say - your first priority is to access the drive and get your data off it.

 

I can suggest 2 or 3 options here:

 

1. Buy a 3.5 inch SATA ( I am assuming SATA ) to USB adapter

Something like this: ( this one is SATA and IDE )

click here

 

2. Attach the drive to another desktop using the SATA data cable and a power connection from the desktop PSU.

 

3. Download and create a Ubuntu disk ( remote Operating System - disk based ) and boot off this to see if you can access your files.

 

Let me know which one you feel most comfortable with.