Windows XP wont reboot

[PoisonNation]

Okay, heres the story:

I was using my computer the other day, and it seemed to be working fine. I shut it down after i was done. I pulled the tower because i dropped something behind it and i accidentally yanked the cord out. So i figure no big deal. I plug it back in and heres where it gets weird. It loads the DELL screen, and then it goes the black screen with the little _ on it. And i see it blinking, and its blinking for a while and i think there must be something wrong. Then it goes to this odd menu that says something about BIOS and it shows my hardrive gigs and it says its healthy and legacy??? I go to the boot menu in F12 and i try to boot windows in all the different safe mode options, it doesnt work and i get this blue screen saying theres some kind of error and windows cant start because it might cause damage to your computer. So then i get the XP CD so i can repair it. And i go to the boot menu and press boot from the CD. and it says it is not available and it has to exit...please help me, ive got a lot of files on my hardrive i havnt backed up yet!

 

[engadgeteer]

Well, you just got a memory dump blue screen. Just restart it and it will go back to normal.

 

[caravel]

I'm afraid it's likely that your machine has been damaged by a power spike. Yes pulling out the power cord while the machine is on, can and often does cause this. At the worst you have some fried hardware, at best the HDD is corrupted or damaged.

The prevention is simple:

1) Never pull out the power lead while the system is on. Either:

a) Shut down/halt the system from the OS or if you can't get it to halt:

b) Hold down the front power button until it goes off.

Even flipping the small rocker switch that is on the back of most PSUs is better than yanking out the lead - but this is also a last resort.



Try resetting BIOS settings to factory defaults first and see if there is any difference.

You're probably looking at a full reinstall whatever the case.

Is the CDROM drive being detected during boot up?

If you want to keep your data you will boot from something like a Linux livecd and move all of your data (if any of the the data is intact) to a USB flash drive. The Livecd will help to gauge whether your hardware is ok or not, as if there is any other damage the disc will fail to boot. Then boot from the windows CDROM and try to do a format. Generally if the drive formats without errors then you can assume that it survived. This is all supposing you can actually get anything to boot from the CD of course. You should try removing the hard disc altogether and see if the CD will boot alone. If it won't or if the Windows setup it self brings up a blue screen error then you have problems.