Someone brought me a HP Notebook with im****tant data on it that was dead.
It was the power jeck that
had to be replaced. Once that was fixed, Windows would take aorund 10
minutes to boot in normal and
safe mode. When it finally did, the mouse would move in 10 second
intervals. In other words, it
would take 5 minutes to drag the mouse from one point of the desktop to
another because it would
intermittanly freeze. Eventually, it would just shut off.
I removed the hard drive and connected it to a desktop PC. I could see
everything on it except the
HP_Laptop user's files. I did not have permission. I told the customer
that that can occur when
there is a password on the user account. He assured me that there was no
password. Then I thought
that the drive might be damaged. I told the customer that by fixing the
power problem, it will not
guarantee that the data is still there. I put the drive back in the
notebook and booted to an XP
image on cd and I saw all of the data there. At this point, I would do an
XP repair installation, so
that the data will remain and the programs will still work. The odd thing
was that when I pressed F8
for the license agreement, it didnt show me any previous installs of
Windows to Repair. It looked
like a new hard drive. But that is wrong because there is a Windows
directory and I can see it from
the boot disk. There is a boot.ini file and all of the usual files.
How does one do a repair installation if XP setup does not even see the
current Windows that is
there. Does anyone know which file may be damaged that would cause this to
happen?
Tony
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