Guest Glen Yardy Medway Youth Service Posted August 15, 2007 Posted August 15, 2007 Hi, I have a laptop i have been updating and when i was installing xp home edition service pack 2 it crashed with a runtime error. It warned that xp might not work properly now. The only thing i could do was reset BIG MISTAKE! When it restarts it starts with the blue load line but then resets and can not go any further! Is there a fix for this without formatting and reinstalling as the person who owns the laptop has 7 years worth of files stored on the machine but not backed up anywhere else! PLEASE HELP!!!!!!!!!
Guest Malke Posted August 15, 2007 Posted August 15, 2007 Re: Service Pack 2 Errors HELP! Glen Yardy Medway Youth Service wrote: > Hi, > > I have a laptop i have been updating and when i was installing xp home > edition service pack 2 it crashed with a runtime error. It warned that xp > might not work properly now. The only thing i could do was reset BIG MISTAKE! > When it restarts it starts with the blue load line but then resets and can > not go any further! > > Is there a fix for this without formatting and reinstalling as the person > who owns the laptop has 7 years worth of files stored on the machine but not > backed up anywhere else! > > PLEASE HELP!!!!!!!!! The first thing to do is retrieve that data. You should have done that *before* doing a major operating system upgrade, not to mention that the owner has been sadly negligent. It is completely possible to retrieve data from a machine that can't boot into Windows. Here are some ways: 1. Pull the drive and slave it in a computer running a working install of XP. Depending on the target drive's characteristics, you may need a drive adapter; i.e., laptop-to-IDE or a SATA controller card, etc. A usb/firewire external drive enclosure works very well, too. Use the working Windows Explorer to copy the data to the rescue system's hard drive and then burn the data to cd or dvd. 2. Often XP will not boot with a slaved drive that has a damaged file system. In that case, boot the target computer with either a Bart's PE or a Linux live cd such as Knoppix and retrieve the data that way. Here is general information on using Knoppix for this: You will need a computer with two cd drives, one of which is a cd/dvd-rw OR a usb thumb drive with enough capacity to hold your data OR an external usb/firewire hard drive formatted FAT32 (not NTFS). To get Knoppix, you need a computer with a fast Internet connection and third-party burning software. Download the Knoppix .iso and create your bootable cd. Then boot with it and it will be able to see the Windows files. If you are using the usb thumb drive or the external hard drive, right-click on its icon (on the Desktop) to get its properties and uncheck the box that says "Read Only". Then click on it to open it. Note that the default mouse action in the window manager used by Knoppix (KDE) is a single click to open instead of the traditional MS Windows' double-click. Otherwise, use the K3b burning program to burn the files to cd/dvd-r's. http://www.knoppix.net http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ - Bart's PE Builder Now, as to your issue - what does "only thing i could do was reset" mean exactly? What did you actually do? Since you didn't back up client data first, can I assume that you also didn't do any preparatory work before attempting to install SP2? You also need to truthfully assess your level of computer skills and if you are just helping out a friend, it would be best at this point to take the machine to a professional computer repair shop. This will not be your local version of BigComputerStore/GeekSquad. I say this not to offend you but only to be practical. Give more details about the computer itself and we will see if we can untangle the mess, but this may be impossible to do without having hands on the machine. Malke -- Elephant Boy Computers http://www.elephantboycomputers.com "Don't Panic!" MS-MVP Windows - Shell/User
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