Help please!!! Getting data error when booting laptop. Urgent!

[TP]

I am trying to help a friend with her laptop. It was fine the last time she used it this morning. SHe shut it down as normal with nothing unusual happening. An hour later she tried to boot it and it hung on the logo screen a long time, then said "data error cannot read from drive C".

I came along and tried booting it in safe mode, but same thing. One time it gave me a different protect window message. It wont go to command mode. It will go to safe command mode but (i dont know if this is normal or not) it says there arent memory dirvers loaded so I cant do a scandisk or anything...

Its a Fujitsu Lifebook 366mhz.

We would really appreciate any advice. SHe is has some important assignments on her disk and is panicking...

UPDATE: I just got a error message saying something about initializing the VKD device...then it automatically shut down again...

 

[Marqui]

I am not too familiar with laptops... but I would check all necessary connections. But it sounds like something is corrupt. If you can get to a dos prompt, or boot off of a floppy, you might want to try reinstalling the OS (or repairing), i don't know which one your are running though... sounds like 98. Reinstalling the os will not over write any programs she had installed of the data associated with the programs...

 

[TP]

Problem fixed.

Here is what worked for me.

safe mode command prompt:

1."attrib -r -a -s -h c:\windows\user.dat" 2."attrib -r -a -s -h c:\windows\system.dat" 3."ren c:\windows\user.dat *.old" 4."ren c:\windows\system.dat *.old" 5.Reboot, run scanreg, done.