First of all, I would like to introduce myself as I have been asked. It is great to find a forum with so many well informed people on it.
And perhaps one of you might just be able to save my skin on this one! I am fairly desperate at this stage! I would really appreciate it if somebody could please take the time to have a look at the problem and what I have tried below.
Basically, my Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop will not boot up in any way. The other day, I downloaded an update for Azureus which was all very normal as I have Zonealarm, up to date McAfee etc. Soon after, my laptop crashed and it would not restart properly. It gets to the Windows XP screen where the blue line moves across for a while and then it stops and hangs.
I have tried the following:
1, Reboot in Safe mode. This does not work as a lot of lines of text appear on the screen(eg. Opening C:/....system32/....). After a short time, it stops moving and nothing else happens.
2, Reboot using previous settings. Again it goes to the Windows screen and then hangs.
3, Reinstall Windows. I inserted the Windows XP Reinstallation CD and expected to see the choice of "Press R for Repair" or "Reinstall Windows". But none of these show up. Instead it seems to try to reboot directly from the CD.
4, Reboot from Windows XP Reinstallation CD. This appears to work as the CD starts running, a blue screen titled Windows Setup comes on and at the bottom of the screen, I can see the files it is finding on the CD. Then it stops running and it says "Setup is starting Windows". But then nothing happens. After half an hour like that, i turned it off as the Hard drive was not moving at all.
All the Microsoft Help I see online tells me to insert Reinstall disk and work from there but I have backed up most of the HD but unfortunately there is some stuff I really need to save on it.
Many Thanks,
PS. My system specs are:
Inspiron 8200
60GB HD
512MB RAM
nvidia64 Video Card
2.2GHz CPU
And perhaps one of you might just be able to save my skin on this one! I am fairly desperate at this stage! I would really appreciate it if somebody could please take the time to have a look at the problem and what I have tried below.
Basically, my Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop will not boot up in any way. The other day, I downloaded an update for Azureus which was all very normal as I have Zonealarm, up to date McAfee etc. Soon after, my laptop crashed and it would not restart properly. It gets to the Windows XP screen where the blue line moves across for a while and then it stops and hangs.
I have tried the following:
1, Reboot in Safe mode. This does not work as a lot of lines of text appear on the screen(eg. Opening C:/....system32/....). After a short time, it stops moving and nothing else happens.
2, Reboot using previous settings. Again it goes to the Windows screen and then hangs.
3, Reinstall Windows. I inserted the Windows XP Reinstallation CD and expected to see the choice of "Press R for Repair" or "Reinstall Windows". But none of these show up. Instead it seems to try to reboot directly from the CD.
4, Reboot from Windows XP Reinstallation CD. This appears to work as the CD starts running, a blue screen titled Windows Setup comes on and at the bottom of the screen, I can see the files it is finding on the CD. Then it stops running and it says "Setup is starting Windows". But then nothing happens. After half an hour like that, i turned it off as the Hard drive was not moving at all.
All the Microsoft Help I see online tells me to insert Reinstall disk and work from there but I have backed up most of the HD but unfortunately there is some stuff I really need to save on it.
Many Thanks,
PS. My system specs are:
Inspiron 8200
60GB HD
512MB RAM
nvidia64 Video Card
2.2GHz CPU