[Sagittaria]

My laptop crashed to the floor today, as it was turned on, and it immediately turned itself off, though the crash was not from a very high or dramatic altitude - just some inches. And now I can't start Windows again, not even in secure mode. A blue screen blinks by for a tenth of a second, and then the computer tries to reboot itself again. But it fails, and the start-up process goes into a loop, that always fails. I can however start the command prompt/DOS.

What does this indicate? Broken harddisk? Broken RAM? Anything else?

It is a Compaq EVO N800v with Windows XP. I don't want to try using Compaqs system restore disks until I have tried everything possible to try to save some information from the harddisk.

Any suggestions on how to rescue information from the harddisk? Could I connect the laptop to our other computers via our network in any way, when I can't start Windows? I can start DOS/the command prompt.

Would be grateful for any input!

 

[Rockn]

Kind of hard to tell. Could be any of number of things that may b broken or have becoe loose from the impact. Try removing the hard drive and boot to a boot diskette. If it boots to a disk the hard drive is probably bad.

 

[WarC]

Since you can run DOS, I don't think anything is wrong with your harddrive or any other components.

EDIT: EEK. When someone like Rockn contradicts you, you have to reiterate. Some other components might be bad, but I don't believe the hard-drive is, since DOS is a program on the disk and runs fine.

My guess is that the abrupt shutdown during the crash caused a system file inside of Windows itself to go haywire and corrupted the installation, hence the looping during the boot process.

If it were a regular harddrive, I'd be easier to pull information off of it, since you could just slave it off of another drive. However since its a laptop such a thing isn't possible, so I think your only recourse is to do a system restore.

 

[MustBNuts]

Are you booting to DOS from a floppy? What about trying to do an XP repair installation? What happens if you boot with the XP install CD in it?

MBN