EH!

[Head Wreck]

I've had a machine in foor repair from a guy who i owe a favour to,

he was using his computer at the time of a powercut and windows seems to have been corrupted (cant even get into safemaode, just the blue screen of winXP death.

so i started to reinstall XP with his Disk, but it doesnt go beyond testing existing software

any thoughts?

[The_Dark]

Boot from the CD and go to the repair console. when you get to the command prompt type chkdsk /r then wait about 40min.

[Head Wreck]

it doesnt even get far enough for me to get to the repair console

[soothsayer]

Have you thought about using a baseball bat?

[The_Dark]

Dude, if you cant boot fromt he cd.. um.. your fucked.

[soothsayer]

Baseball bat it is!

[Head Wreck]

thoiught so. just thought i'd confirm it

thankfully the guy has a secon HDD to store his stuff.

computers 3 years old. may sudgest a budget upgrade plan for him, after i find out what he uses it for.

i hate it when people buy packard bell PC's. HDD's allways are shoddy cheap POS things and the mainboards melt near the memory :(

[Scary Guy]

It completely depends on what and how the company they buy it from sets up their CD's. Most of them aren't bootable like they should be and offer limited recovery options.

Your best bet is to find a boot disk (with MSCDEX drivers so the CD-ROM will work) and boot with that. Then try poping in the CD and running setup or something.

[The_Dark]

He runs Windows XP. All Windows CDs, since Windows 98, are bootalbe.

[Head Wreck]

ah the joys of clearing out files he kept at home for "safekeeping" instead of his works machine.

he has password protected identities in his XP setup. i didnt realise this would prevent me from accessing the files when used as a slave HDD on my machine

any advice on accessing or backing these up for him

[The_Dark]

OK, first you have to turn off Simple File sharing. You can do this by:

1. Open Folder Options in Control Panel.

2. Click Start, and then click Control Panel.

3. Double-click Folder Options.

a. On the View tab, under Advanced settings, clear Use simple file sharing

Now to actually take ownership of the files.

1. Open Windows Explorer, and then locate the file or folder you want to take ownership of.

2. Right-click the file or folder, click Properties, and then click the Security tab.

3. Click Advanced, and then click the Owner tab.

4. In the Change owner to box, click the new owner.

a. To change the owner of all subcontainers and objects within the tree, select the Replace owner on subcontainers and objects check box.

There you go.

[Head Wreck]

cheers!

much appreciated

edit:

cant find use simple file sharing under the advanced settings

also cant find a security tab on the properties dialog.

:confused

[The_Dark]

One of these days I am going to send you a bill.

[Head Wreck]

oops

[The_Dark]

Figure it out?

[Head Wreck]

nope

ah well

i told him it was probably fucked.

i'll get what i can of it

[The_Dark]

You use MSN Messanger? if so, add me and let me take control. I can fix it from here.

bishop_castle@hotmail.com

[Soulrev]

If you can you take your HD out of your PC put it into a working PC, format the drive, reinstall WinXp.

[Head Wreck]

HDD has to many bad sectors.

ordered new mainboard and HDD for him today.