I think its dead!

So today while I was at school there was a power blink at home, like a 30 second blink. Soemthing happened though and the battery backup on my parents computer did not work, the computer turned off. When my father (who is pretty computer literate) turned the machine back on it loaded into the standard was shut down wrong how do you want to start, naturally he chose start windows normally.

It started to load and a few secodns after the windows loading screen appeared the computer restarts. He and I both have since then tried every boot option, hit F8 and tried everything, even the step by step booting, The computer simply starts to go then restarts.

I think either the hard drive is basicly dead (its a SATA hdd) or windows is dead. I haven't had time to mess with it more but I'll be out for the night so I thought I'd see your guys opinion.

I'm going to use a Linux LiveCD to get the data off of it...

Thanks.

Do you have a boot or rescue floppy? (do you even have a floppy on your machine?)

Most BIOSes these days have a boot from CD-ROM. So, if you have your original install disk, you can load the recovery program from that.

You may even be able to boot from a USB drive now days.

mbigna said:

Do you have a boot or rescue floppy? (do you even have a floppy on your machine?)

Most BIOSes these days have a boot from CD-ROM. So, if you have your original install disk, you can load the recovery program from that.

You may even be able to boot from a USB drive now days.

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Yeah We've got the reinstallation disk, I think its the suxs! that they coem with out a floppy, but thats why we have Linux Live CD's . I was just wondering if anyone had any ideas before I painfully do a windows repair, and the million updates.

your battery backup didn't work? that's odd, just the other day my battery backup protected this system from something that would have definately pwned it (a surge followed by 10 seconds of low voltage, my florescent light starter blew up from it). anyway, i did have a similar problem when my dad decided to turn a computer on immediately after a blackout. the power flickered during startup and the only way to get it to boot was to reinstall windows. the fact that you use linux is going to make this much more painful (why am i installing windows...again?), but that's all i can think of.

Your best bet is to restore the registry to the backup copy of the original registry. Boot your system and copy some reg files from your system restore points and then perform a system restore. There is a full guide at microsof ttechnet on how to recover from a corrupt registry. A corrupt registry might not be the case here but I would give it a shot because it may allow you to recover completely. You also may want to run a scan on the filesystem and hard drive. The recovery console is probably the best place to access the drive and work on it.

brakezone said:

Your best bet is to restore the registry to the backup copy of the original registry. Boot your system and copy some reg files from your system restore points and then perform a system restore. There is a full guide at microsof ttechnet on how to recover from a corrupt registry. A corrupt registry might not be the case here but I would give it a shot because it may allow you to recover completely.

Click to expand...

OK thanks, I'll try that.