chilli Posted May 31, 2008 Share Posted May 31, 2008 Hi, my laptop has got messed up. was working fine, rebooted it and now won't boot at all. it fails right at the start (i.e. before any windows loading starts). going in via the windows xp disk and recovery console I've run a chkdsk which completed ok but the machine still won't boot. strange this is when i view the files and folders on the disk via the recovery console, some of the folders and files report as 0 bytes even though I know they were not empty. all the files and folders are listed though but somethings messed up for them to be reported as 0 bytes in size. The OS is XP pro and I think it's the normal NTFS5 file system IIRC. Is there an easy / safe way to recover the drive. I suspect most of the data is on there but I need to restore the file system and I'm scared I'll make it worse or unrecoverable if I make the wrong move. naturally reinstalling is a last resort - I'd really like to recover the disk is fixmbr the way to go, is it actually the mbr that's wrong? I don't want to try that unless that's the right thing to do, I hear using fixmbr can result in data loss. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RedM Posted May 31, 2008 Share Posted May 31, 2008 You've not (somehow) disabled the HDD in the BIOS settings have you? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chilli Posted May 31, 2008 Author Share Posted May 31, 2008 no, I can get to the hdd because booting off of cd shows the contents of C:\ - it's that some of the files and folders are zero bytes - it's been corrupted I guess when it last shbut down Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lizzeh Posted June 1, 2008 Share Posted June 1, 2008 The best/safest thing to do would be to boot up a Live CD such as Slax. (It has a nice simple GUI and works really well.) Then (purchase if not own one already) plug in an external USB hard drive and copy the contents of your C:\ drive to the external USB drive, even if they report 0 bytes. Once you copy everything, reformat the drive. It's always good to make frequent backups of your stuff...theres tons of software out there to do so. And I always recommend an external USB drive Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Carl_S Posted June 1, 2008 Share Posted June 1, 2008 Hi, my laptop has got messed up. was working fine, rebooted it and now won't boot at all. it fails right at the start (i.e. before any windows loading starts). going in via the windows xp disk and recovery console I've run a chkdsk which completed ok but the machine still won't boot. strange this is when i view the files and folders on the disk via the recovery console, some of the folders and files report as 0 bytes even though I know they were not empty. all the files and folders are listed though but somethings messed up for them to be reported as 0 bytes in size. The OS is XP pro and I think it's the normal NTFS5 file system IIRC. Is there an easy / safe way to recover the drive. I suspect most of the data is on there but I need to restore the file system and I'm scared I'll make it worse or unrecoverable if I make the wrong move. naturally reinstalling is a last resort - I'd really like to recover the disk is fixmbr the way to go, is it actually the mbr that's wrong? I don't want to try that unless that's the right thing to do, I hear using fixmbr can result in data loss. when I have had severe boot up probs in the past I just installed a new OS onto the drive without wiping the data off it, so I could access it under the new OS. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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