Comuter wont boot up.. Help!

[Humz]

I have WINME on my PC.

Computer was left on to download stuff at night.

In the morning the screen saver was stuck. So I tried ctrl+alt+del. It did not work. SO i hit restart button. BIOS finds the hard drive but it hangs at IDE0 looking for boot up files.

So, I put this hard drive as slave and scandisk runs for D drive. Scandisk is completed. My computer shows D and other partitions as harddrive but not showing the size information.

What could be doing this?

How can i do safe recovery on this hard drive? as I do have image file that is 15 days for primary dos partition but other partitions have lots of data that I dont want to loose.

Thanks for all the help in advance. Let me know if you need more information on any detail.

 

[Shiney]

As you was downloading stuff , im suspect that you may have had an unwelcome visitor or virus on your machine. Try running a virus check using latest virus patterns. Can you see the data on the drive using dir. You may have to boot from a os cd or floppy to check.

 

[Humz]

Hmmm,

I can run virus scan but will virus scan detect the hard drive? If it does and tells me it will be easy solution. What if it tells me that your boot record is updated then what to do? accept the updated boot record? or tell virus scan( NAV) to go to old one? I am asking this coz I lost one hard drive already going back to old mbr, and then I lost all the data on it and also other partitions as well.
I dont want that happen to me again.

So please help or give me some more information about what could be going on and how to resolve the situation.

TIA.

 

[Humz]

Any other things I need to know like how to recover boot record? or boot sector? or how to get the partitioning information recorded or backed up on the hard drive as it has four Logical partitions also.

thanks

 

[RealBlackStuff]

Check that all your HD-cables (IDE and power) are properly connected on both sides. Put that disk back as master, the way it was before. Also check that all AGP/PCI-cards and the memory are properly seated.
Try again and keep hitting F8 until you are in your startup menu. Try to do a boot to the last good version.
Otherwise I think ME lets you roll back like in XP.

 

[Humz]

I have Hot swappable hard drives and i can also choose to boot up from IDE0 or IDE1. And I can boot up from IDE1, a different hard drive, that means all other hardware is seated properly. I will check for the problem hard drive for any connection issues.

Also what about sys C:, does it work for ME? like I boot up from floppy and then transfer the system files to the C drive? will it work?

Can I copy other WinME boot sector to this hard drive? so that it may work ? ( in case some unwanted virus or hacker changed my boot sector)

what could have happened to the hard drive? I know its not dead. So what else could be the situation, where it wont boot up?

Thanks.

 

[RealBlackStuff]

If you can start from a DOS-floppy (provided DOS is still inside ME), you could try to start from floppy and then enter the command: fdisk /mbr
This would restore the standard MasterBootRecord but if you would have any boot-menu, this would get lost.

Reading though your post again, if you have no new stuff on the primary partition of that HD, the reload the 15-day old image. At least you would have a running HD again. Then you can copy the data from the other partitions to another HD.

 

[Greeno]

Never ceases to amaze me how people's PC's that won't boot post on forums heh...

WinME doesn't have a last known good configuration.