HELP HELP HELP! I can't get my home PC to start - All my photos of the children are gone

[SheikYerbouti]

I am distraught

Just went tonrto other PC, asI need something off it (am on work PC at the mo) and It tells me Windows won;t start as something is coirrupt.

What am I coing to do?

They could move it onto another hard drive I expect

Hey Sheik - like SMSSW said - calm down. All that's missing is a display file - PC won't boot but your data will all be happily sat there. So nothing lost.

I'm guessing that as you're on here you've got access to another PC

www.geekstogo.com/forum/Windows-cannot-boot-vgaoem-fon-t117127.html

Should give you enough info to repair it..

this happened to us recently, we got our local 'pc doctor' to rescue all the stuff off the hard drive and put a new one in - stupidly we still haven't backed it all up since, so will be doing that tonight then... hope you get it sorted, its v scary

I'm glad all is not lost

On work PC - I work from home.

Thank fuck I have this, or I'd go mental

have you got it sorted yet?

You can always download and burn a Knoppix live cd, basically it's a whole operating system on one CD. You just have to tell your computer to boot from the CD drive when the CD is in and you can access all your data.

If you have a separate USB hard drive you can plug that in and copy all your files across before trying to do anything to restore windows that might damage your data. If you don't have a separate USB drive then you it could be worth it to think about getting one for backups in the future to avoid this stress next time. We never back up until something like this happens, then we are all diligent for a couple of months then back into our bad ways.
It's also a good idea to download something like Knoppix while you have access to your PC to keep safe for something happening when you don't.

This has just happened to us - all my photos are on a hard drive on the defunct PC, DH is going to remove the HD from the old PC to transfer the data to the new one. He says it's not difficult to do if you know what your doing, so I'm sure you can pay some techy type to do the same. It's not lost, it's just currently inaccessible I'm p'd off because we'd just bought an external hard drive that DH was in the middle of transferring all this stuff onto, but the PC died before he got around to the photos >

you're, I mean

y home pc has died, too. It's on a 3 year contract so the guy came on Fri and installed a new hard drive but had to take the old one away. I've lost everything, but thank goodness I always get a cd made when I take photos in to print.

Lesson learned - we're buying an external hard drive now!

as stated above... you need to find a friend with a working pc and dvd writer.. you can take the hdd out of your system and put it in their system as a second drive.

When they boot their pc your hdd will show up as something like E: and you can copy all your file to a DVD...

Once you have these files you can either stick the system disks back in a rebuild from scratch or take it to an expert who may be able to fix the issue..

DS says:

There are so many things this could be, it is really hard to determine what the error is.
If it gave you the option to run a disk check, do it; this can often fix many errors, though takes a little time.

So fixing this is not too easy without physical access to the PC - a local techie store is probably your best bet. However, there are ways to get the files back - and without much hassle.

The main 2 methods are:
1)-Take out the hard drive inside the computer, get a second computer (a friends or whatever), and copy all the data off to another hard drive.

Lurking dad posted something very similar, which will work.
This method is a little more complex, but can work just as well.

You will need:
-A second PC
-A blank CD
Download SLAX - www.slax.org - it's a cd that is it's own operating system, but does not need to be installed.

Burn the .iso to a CD, www.petri.co.il/how_to_write_iso_files_to_cd.htm
then put it in the system, and turn it on.
Plug in an external drive to back up all data to it.

There is an icon called SYSTEM on the deskop. Find the drive with the lesser storage (the bigger one is the external drive), and then copy everything to a new folder on your hard drive.

Turn off your computer, take out the hard drive and now you have a backup.

In the future though, make sure to regularly back up, incase this happens again!

Sorry if this isn't clear enough!