Problems with Windows on a friends laptop......

[MJGunn]

Friend calls me this morning, complaining that his laptop isn't working. He turns it on, goes it seems to boot into windows normally, but then, loads only his wallpaper, and nothing else. No task bar, no desktop icons. If he hits ctrl-alt-del, task manager comes up, I had him try to run explorer, didn't work. Had him try to reboot and go into safe mode, same thing, wallpaper showing, nothing else.

I'm kind of stumped as to what to have him try next. Anyone know whats wrong, or have any suggestions?

 

[Zepper]

XP Setup has a repair mode. Have him try that.
.bh.

 

[MJGunn]

He definetly doesn't have his XP cd, I told him to have his recovery cds shipped to him (hes in FL, me and the cds are in NJ). If I don't figure out whats wrong with it by the time he gets the cds I'll just have him wipe the thing.

 

[johnjkr1]

I had the same problem with two different users...there was nothing i could do ( I tried everything I knew in the recovery console). They said they couldn't lost their data, so I had them do a repair, and it was back up and running just like they left it.

 

[lobadobadingdong]

have him get into a command prompt and key in "chkdsk /r" without the quotation marks.
it will tell him he has to restart for it to scan the disk, let it, reboot and let it check for inconsistancies. sometimes this works for that problem, sometimes it don't 50/50 chance in my experience.