XP won't boot. Goes to black screen.

macphisto

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Aug 22, 2010
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18,510
Hello.

I just had to sign up here, as I'm experiencing a bit of a serious problem regarding getting into my desktop at the moment, which I can't do. My PC starts up fine, but once it gets past the initial slash screen, then a black screen with a flashing white dot, which normally appears then the XP loading bar appears, but instead of this loading screen, there is nothing but black after the white dot. I tried using my recovery disc, and I've made sure the bios is set correctly, but the disc mostly just fails to load at all, while sometimes I will get the "press any key" promt. This will allow me to go to a blue screen where loading of certain system programs takes place very slowly, but then I will get a message informing me of a failer and to press any key to continue, in which case it then says the computer must be restarted and then I'm back at square one again. It's maddening.

This issue only came about when an annoying trojan called AV Security Suite invaded my system. I Googled for a sollution, and was so informed that a program called Malwarebytes would sort it out. I went into safe mode, performed the scan, it detected a dozen infections, so I hit delet to get rid and rebooted. At the restart, this problem persisted. One other detail is that I noticed that the list of commands that streams down the screen before loading in safe mode or using the "last known working config" option holding F8, that list now stops short of loading what it should load and just hangs.

The computer itself, I don't really care about. It's the work files I have on it that I need. But if I can't even boot a repair CD, is there anything I can do to get into the drive?

Please help!
 
Desperate to salvage?

Remove the drive from the computer and install it as an extra data disk in another machine. copy out important things.
Re-format using same computer:

Start>run>cmd>format X: /r /x /q      (X is that drive's letter.)

Put drive back in original computer, re-install Windows.


Another way: Google   "ERD Commander 2005"
Make the boot disk that it is, boot with it, include networking.
It has a Windows explorer function. Copy out what you want to keep via network to another machine.
 

macphisto

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Aug 22, 2010
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18,510
Thank you for the reply. I was thinking of doing just that. It's just a matter of finding another system to slave the disk from, as everyone I know seems to use a laptop these days. I was also considering the posibility of using an external drive formated with windows. Would it be possible to boot from that as a primary master and have my internal recognised by the bios as a slave and go from there?