Hi,
I try to help local people with their PC's and someone on my local FreeCycle Yahoo group asked for help with a PC that wouldn't boot (XP Home), she's fine with a rebuild which I can easily do but she hoped to get some valuable photos off it, the only copies she had. Given that I've already been advised to upgrade the system I'd like to point out that I am doing this as a favour for a fellow group member, the woman in question cannot afford to upgrade.
She dropped the system round last night and I tested it ... as expected it didn't boot.
The symptoms are, it powers up apparently normally and reaches the "Windows was not shut down properly" text screen ... on selecting any option (inc. Sage Boot & Last Known Good) it reboots almost immediately after. As far as I can tell the basic hardware is AOK and that she was getting this error before but an additional option is available (on an earlier screen I believe, it's a Packard Bell system) which allows the user to recover the system and she did try that, it didn't work but may have compounded the partition issues).
Eventually I removed the drive and put it in my SATA docking station ... the drive detected fine with main partition visible leading me to suspect the hardware is fine but when I click on that partition I get:
F:\ is not accessible
The file or directory is corrupt and unreadable
Any ideas as I'd really like to save this woman's data (she has some family photos on it that have no backups) before I go ahead and trash/rebuild the system?
Suggestions I've had so far are CHKDSK, PC Inspector and Recuva.
Do you see any issues with any of these and what order do I try them in (some may be more destructive than others).
My best guess would be:
1. CHKDSK (what harm can it do?)
2. PC Inspector (since it accesses files rather than the whole partition)
3. Recuva (partition recovery)
4. Rebuild (without trashing the partition)
Any others thoughts?
Kyu
