BSOD followed by restart

[davelaptop]

Hi there eyeryone, hope you can help with this problem:

My laptop starts up and goes straight to "Windows did not start successfully. A recent hardware or software change may have caused this"

It gives the options to load up in safe mode etc. Then it goes into the normal windows XP loading screen with the progress bar. During this, there is a quick flash of a blue screen(not long enough to read any of the details) and then it restarts and begins the process again.

Is this fixable? If so, any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Dave

 

[raybay]

It is useful to turn off the ability of your system to automatically restart. Without the restart, you will usually get more useful screens on what the problem is... but you will still have work to do. To turn off automatic restart:

Start -> Control –Panel -> System -> System Properties -> Advanced -> Startup and Recovery -> Settings -> System Failure -> Uncheck Automatic Restart

 

[davelaptop]

It doesn't get that far in, it resets before even the log on screen comes up

 

[raybay]

I suspect that your hard drive has gone bad. What is the age of the computer and of the hard drive.
If you put that drive away now, until a new drive is installed, you can likely rescue all your important data and emails by using an external hard drive enclosure on a USB cable.

 

[davelaptop]

Ok, I've got an external hard drive, how will I be able to use it to rescue the data? The laptop is about 5/6 years old. Will I need to replace the hard drive on it before I can rescue the data?

 

[raybay]

Yes, you can assume that with a drive that old, there will be difficulties...

You can buy a new drive and install Windows with your existing disk, then place the old drive in an external enclosure and drag your data to the new drive after than new drive is fullyu installed... but that fully installed means you must have the install disks for the programs that were installed on the failing drive.