hey folks
The hard drive in a cheap circuit city box compaq computer i have is having problems.
Computer crashed dead after I installed Office 2003. Not saying that the install did it, but that's just the timing. Seems to be stuck in the system restore loop. When it boots up, it goes to the system restore screen. tells me to either try a system restore or use the windows xp repair tools. If I select windows xp repair, it reboots but I cannot get it to boot to CD, even though I set the CD to the first boot priority. I believe the system restore trigger is overriding something. If I choose system restore, it tries and says cannot find user partition.
Sure enough, when I take the 40gb hd out and put it in another machine as a second slave drive, it shows up as a 2gb partition ONLY, instead of a 38gb partition and a 2gb 'system restore' partition.
Curiously, when I stick the hd into another computer as a primary, it boots to the system restore partition. Not surprisingly, apparenlty its the only partition showing up.
Is this an issue where the hd's 'table of contents' has been corrupted and lost the main partition?
Need help! I would really like not to lose the data on this disk. Any suggestions?
The hard drive in a cheap circuit city box compaq computer i have is having problems.
Computer crashed dead after I installed Office 2003. Not saying that the install did it, but that's just the timing. Seems to be stuck in the system restore loop. When it boots up, it goes to the system restore screen. tells me to either try a system restore or use the windows xp repair tools. If I select windows xp repair, it reboots but I cannot get it to boot to CD, even though I set the CD to the first boot priority. I believe the system restore trigger is overriding something. If I choose system restore, it tries and says cannot find user partition.
Sure enough, when I take the 40gb hd out and put it in another machine as a second slave drive, it shows up as a 2gb partition ONLY, instead of a 38gb partition and a 2gb 'system restore' partition.
Curiously, when I stick the hd into another computer as a primary, it boots to the system restore partition. Not surprisingly, apparenlty its the only partition showing up.
Is this an issue where the hd's 'table of contents' has been corrupted and lost the main partition?
Need help! I would really like not to lose the data on this disk. Any suggestions?