Help!

[Cyfr]

Last night my pc was going funny so I rebooted. Its runing xp so the login came up, I entered password. It then took ages to load and started looking for floppys in drive. It came onto a screen with just the windows background.

All I could do was task manager, then open up new tasks. But, I tried to open things like NOrton Anti Virus and it said they couldnt be found. I then opened command which worked. I opened Norton Through that, it worked. But it wouldnt scan.

Safe mode is just black.

I really dont want to reformat because theres important info on the pc, is it possible to save it?
THANKS!

 

[Wilier]

Are you running any kind of theme management software, such as Style XP etc?

Ive had a similar problem in the past where a theme I installed went wrong and everything was just black. Ended up stopping StyleXP and removing the damaged theme.

 

[Cyfr]

Unfortumatly I don't use any theme program so no, it's not that

 

[Mr.Monkey]

Use your winxp recovery disks, then do a scandisk by going into the command prompt:

chkdsk /?

Then select your main drive (usually c and the "scan all unflagged" (which I think is /r, but i'm not 100%).

So for example
chkdsk c: /r

Can take a while, depending on the size of your HD.
This may sort things out. Failing that, it should get you into safemode, where you can backup your vital files.

 

[Cyfr]

Thanks will do that now. I tried it before, it asked for something which I replyed '1'

It then asked admin password, and I only use one PW for my windows, but it wouldnt work

 

[finbow]

this teaches us, always make a seperate partition for windows installation

 

[(Shovel)]

Originally posted by Cyfr
Thanks will do that now. I tried it before, it asked for something which I replyed '1'

It then asked admin password, and I only use one PW for my windows, but it wouldnt work

You may find that you haven't set a password for the admin account - it's a very common mistake as the Admin account tends to be hidden from you. just leave it blank and see what happens

 

[Cyfr]

aye I was just told that on irc and your correct, I didnt have a pw