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Gandalf

A little backup trick...

Get a Yahoo email account, then email the pictures, etc to yourself.
Yahoo keeps the emails backed up and the process is free.

Just a thought...

DIIRE

As long as you check the email add atleast every 30 days - it works good for online storage.

However if you don't check it for more than 30 days you will lose all your data.

Gandalf

I know that is the case with Hotmail, but I do not think that is a problem with Yahoo. Anyway, since you are sending it to yourself, you just login and save the email to a secondary folder.

DIIRE

It's the same with yahoo. I think most of them do it nowadays to free up room on the servers.

dhill

Originally Posted by DIIRE

What commands did you try from Recovery Console?

What happens when you try to boot normally? Error messages, reboot loop, etc

Also just as a side note - a backup external hdd can fail just as easily as a normal internal hdd, in fact I've seen them fail more often than internal hard drives as they're often transported around which makes them more succeptible to being dropped, etc. I always keep 3 backups of personal things like photo's etc that i'd be devastated to lose. 2 hdd's (on separate pc's) and 1 online storage. The chances of 2 hdd's plus online storage all failing at once is pretty much zero.

If you want to know more about online storage, ih8bills can give you some excellent info and links.

I tried chkdsk /r, fixboot, and fixmbr. If I try to boot normally it goes into a loop and keeps coming up with the page that lets you select safe mode and all of those options.

Thanks for the info about my external - I may have to back up a few important files in my gmail account or something.

DIIRE

Try the following from Recovery Console. This will hopefully get you into the pc to backup the files. The passwords and user accounts may not be the same afterwards, however you should still be able to log in with the Administrator account and no password if one was never set.

When prompted press any key to boot from CD. After XP has loaded at the first screen.
1. Press R for "to repair a windows installation using Recovery Console"
2. Type in number for windows installation you want to log onto - is usually 1 > press enter
3. Enter the administrator password if one was set.
4. Change to configuration folder type: cd windows\system32\config
5. Backup your configuration by typing the following to rename the files: (don't type the word "type" or :
type: ren default default.bak
type: ren sam sam.bak
type: ren system system.bak
type: ren software software.bak
type: ren security security.bak

cd c:\windows\repair

Copy and rename the files to the system32/config folder by typing the following:
type: copy DEFAULT c:\windows\system32\config\default
type: copy SAM c:\windows\system32\config\sam
type: copy SECURITY c:\windows\system32\config\security
type: copy SOFTWARE c:\windows\system32\config\software
type: copy SYSTEM c:\windows\system32\config\system

Check if the repair folder exists before doing the above. If it doesn't post back.

dhill

I just tried doing this and the repair folder doesn't exist. Also, something unusual I noticed is the 2 choices for windows installations. One is named H:/I386 (something like that) and the other H:/MiniNT