Here's my situation, I hope you fellas can save me here.
My buddy just had a Dell computer choke and die. From what I'm gathering from him, he was playing online poker or something, got a popup that asked him to update something, or delete something (having to do with SP2, sounds awfully fishy), and upon restarting he can't get booted.
The computer will POST, then blue screen as soon as it starts loading XP. He can't even get it started in safe mode (same blue screen problem). He ran the Dell recovery disc, repair XP, and it did no good. I told him to try plugging that hard drive into another XP machine as a slave to get his files off, and it ALMOST worked, but he couldn't view and/or copy most folders because XP was telling him that he did not have permissions to manipulate them. Apparently there's a security feature in XP that keeps computers other than the original computer from messing with certain folders.
Does anybody know for sure if I were to have him buy a new hard drive and run the Dell recovery disc, would it allow him to install a fresh OS onto a new hard drive? Even if that worked, would the computer then allow him to see the files on the corrupted hard drive, or would it tell him that it's still not the right computer? (I mean, do those security measures check the hardware, or do they check something in the OS like the computer's name, or the admin's name, or some other magical ID thing?)
Where exactly are the settings for this goofy security feature? (I've never seen them). Is it possible to totally re-install XP over itself to solve the problem, or would that forever screw up the magical ID thingy I'm fighting against and seal up those files forever?
*sigh* This is why I started building my own instead of dealing with HP, Dell, etc. . .
Thanks for reading! :beer:
My buddy just had a Dell computer choke and die. From what I'm gathering from him, he was playing online poker or something, got a popup that asked him to update something, or delete something (having to do with SP2, sounds awfully fishy), and upon restarting he can't get booted.
The computer will POST, then blue screen as soon as it starts loading XP. He can't even get it started in safe mode (same blue screen problem). He ran the Dell recovery disc, repair XP, and it did no good. I told him to try plugging that hard drive into another XP machine as a slave to get his files off, and it ALMOST worked, but he couldn't view and/or copy most folders because XP was telling him that he did not have permissions to manipulate them. Apparently there's a security feature in XP that keeps computers other than the original computer from messing with certain folders.
Does anybody know for sure if I were to have him buy a new hard drive and run the Dell recovery disc, would it allow him to install a fresh OS onto a new hard drive? Even if that worked, would the computer then allow him to see the files on the corrupted hard drive, or would it tell him that it's still not the right computer? (I mean, do those security measures check the hardware, or do they check something in the OS like the computer's name, or the admin's name, or some other magical ID thing?)
Where exactly are the settings for this goofy security feature? (I've never seen them). Is it possible to totally re-install XP over itself to solve the problem, or would that forever screw up the magical ID thingy I'm fighting against and seal up those files forever?
*sigh* This is why I started building my own instead of dealing with HP, Dell, etc. . .
Thanks for reading! :beer:
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