I was working on my PC yesterday and started getting wierd occurrances errors. I have not installed anything or done anything configuration wise in days if not weeks now, so I can pretty much rule out that.... anyhow I decided to reboot because little strange things were happening (Photoshop would not open Imageready to save files... then when I tried to reload Photoshop it told me a non-recoverable system error occurred and it had to close).
When I rebooted, the system never came back up. It went through the OS choice screen ok, even made it to the screen with the XP logo and the three blocks scrolling across showing it's loading. After that, when it usually goes to the login/user choise screen, it goes blank.
From there, I only have myself to blame... I booted into safe mode ok, but was not really sure what to do and without networking (I could not get it to come back with networking) did not really have the Internet as a resource to troubleshoot. I ran some diagnostic tools (Norton DiskDoctor and stuff like that) and got some messages that there were some system files that were not of expected size or length or something like that. There was only like one or two errors, but it could not fix them because they were locked exclusively by Windows....
I brilliantly decided to REINSTALL XP, thinking that would fix the messed up system files. Well, it got through most of the new install ok, and then (as it always does) it fires a reboot. Once it reboots same thing happens... it goes to the XP logo screen... tells me setup is going to continune, and then turns black.... I've let it sit for hours, but something is not happening.. no HDD activity, nothing.
So now, I cannot get into safe mode. My OS is on it's own partition and most of my data is on an NTFS partition... however all my desktop stuff and emails are on the C drive, so I hesitate to just wipe out my C and reinstall. Is there any option to get around this? To make matters worse for some reason when I boot to DOS, I cannot access my A drive!!! I don't know if the *one* floppy I have is a bad floppy or what, but I cannot access it from DOS. I guess that's my last ditch chance, but if anyone knows a way to save my data on the C drive, please let me know..
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