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I don't know wtf happened. Everything was working fine this morning.. I turned it off, came back, and now its dead. wtf?

Windows XP logo boots, but after that, all I get is a black screen.

I do have a system recovery disk, but that would delete all my freaking files. ****.. I should saved all my personal files the f drive instead of the C drive.

Anyone know how i can fix this w/o deleting my old files?

I reboot, and get a "safe mode" screen.. I log into safemode, and get this weird message.


WTF is wrong?

Hello Gday,

It sounds like there may be a problem with your hard drive. It looks like it's freezing during the loading of Safe Mode, which is a common indicator of a failing hard drive.

Before doing anything else, if you are very worried about your data, I would highly recommend that you stop trying to power on your computer, take the hard drive out, and connect it to another computer to try to recover your important data. If your drive is going bad, you are potentially making it worse every time you boot the computer up.

If you don't feel comfortable taking the drive out, you may want to take your computer to a professional to have the data saved before trying anything else.

When you are done trying your hard drive in another machine, let me know after you have all of your data (or are unable to get it), then we can go from there on trying to isolate your problem.

Hope that helps!

Ok, I took out the hard drive but I am running a "raid" setup.. how do I copy all my files?

Also, if he HD was going bad, shouldn't I hear some whining noise or something?

And yes, it freezes in safemode after I get that driver loading message, it just sits there and doesn't do anything.

If it is RAID 0 (striping), unfortunately, there is nothing you can do to save your data. There is no data redundancy in a RAID 0 setup.

If it is RAID 1 (mirroring), then you just hook it up to another computer and try to access the data.

I'm guessing you have a striping setup though from the sounds of it. If the drive is in fact going bad, and you have them striped, then you basically need to replace the bad drive and start over.

If you do have a striping setup, just connect the drives back up and run a hard drive diagnostic. Normally I would suggest against doing it because the diagnostic could end up killing the drive. But, if you have the drives striped, then you can't salvage your data anyway. So at least if you do a hard drive diagnostic on both of your drives, you can see if the drive is actually going bad or if it is another problem.

To do a diagnostic, click on the link in my signature that corresponds to your hard drive brand. From there you will follow the instructions on creating a bootable diagnostics disk. Create the disk, then boot to it and run the diagnostic to see if your drive(s) are bad.

If you need help with any of the steps, just let me know.

Hope that helps!