My old PC won't start

M

moonchicken

New Member
Hi
I know nothing about computers. I have an old pc which I havn't used for 2 years. It has a lot of old photos on it which I want. However when I turn the computer on I get this message

Your IDE CDrom(s) should have been named beginning with drive letter R:

If your CDrom drive wasn't detected you can changed drivers by editing config.sys and simply changing cd1.sys to cd2.sys, or cd3.sys, etc. as there are 4 different universal CDrom drivers to choose from.

Or, you can now /fdisk and/or format your hard drive now if you so wish
smartdrv has already been loaded to speed things up. To install XP directly from CDrom letter of your choice, navigate to the i386 folder on the CD and type winnt.exe

Or, it's a nice touch to first make a folder on your HardDrive named XP and then copy the contents of the i386 folder from the CD to it first. Then navigate to that folder and type winnt.exe

Good Luck

A:/>
Any idea what that means and can I get into the hard drive and retrieve the data?

Thanks
 
"Good Luck"?? Why do I get the impression that isn't from Microsoft?
First thing I'd do is replace the motherboard CMOS battery, and then get into the hard drive autodetect settings in your BIOS and try again.
Tom
 
OvenMaster said:
"Good Luck"?? Why do I get the impression that isn't from Microsoft?
First thing I'd do is replace the motherboard CMOS battery, and then get into the hard drive autodetect settings in your BIOS and try again.
Tom
Click to expand...

Hi
I know very little about these matters - now when I start it says

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
\Windows\System32\Config\System

You can attempt to repair this file by starting windows setup using the original setup cd-rom. Select 'r' at the first screen to repair.

I do not have the original start up disk. Can I do anything myself? Or are there specialists I can take the hard drive to?
Cheers
 
You can take the hard drive out and put it in as a second drive in a working computer and get your data that way.
 
If you do that, remember to set it as slave by placing the jumper appropriately. Instructions should be found on the harddrive itself.
 
The drive there is most likely heavily fragmented as well as having lost partial or complete boot sector information needed in order to get the system running. You could try booting with even an old 98 or ME startup floppy as well as booting with XP cd to the recovery console to enter "fdisk /mbr" when at the dos prompt with a floppy or "FIXBOOT" and "FIXMBR" at the recovery console's prompt and press enter on those to see if you could Windows to even partially boot. That would be a good indicator that the files on the drive still have enough left for recovery by various means.

If the drive turns out to be inaccessible when slaved to a working drive the option then is to try one of the Linux Live cds to boot without any Windows active. The Live cd is a limited but self contained OS on a cd rather then hard drive. The two distros in mine there are the Ubuntu and Knoppix Live versions. The user interface is easier to use then other distros and can easily access even old 16bit dos partitions as well as NTFS seen on NT, 2000, and XP machines.
 
You have the A promt at the end, so you're trying to do something through dos? It seems you simply don't have the drivers loaded for the CD-ROM's in dos...or you don't have them set to make the CD-ROM(s) R:...such an odd letter.

Is this the case, though? If so, I'd suggest finding a copy of say a windows 98 boot disk, booting your machine with CD-ROM support(usally you can even change the drive letters though the autoexec.bat or config.sys files, I forget which actually assigns the letters...) and then try to load the program. Well, this is assuming you don't have 2000/XP and/or your drive's in NTFS... :o
 
I had one here with XP on it that sat around for only a matter of months and it wouldn't boot due to the drive's boot sector not being detected. I ended up wiping the drive for a fresh copy of Windows to go on along with a Linux distro. At the time I already everything backed up on a new drive if not writtern to cd-r/dvd-r.

Even on a drive running 2000 or XP the old 98 floppy will work most of the time for repair of the master boot record. Just make sure that it is set as the first boot device in the bios after using the 98 floppy or recovery console. Then there are other options.
http://www.ntfs.com/products.htm
http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/netsecur/article.php/625721
http://www.brienposey.com/kb/repairing_the_mbr.asp
http://kb.iu.edu/data/aijw.html
 
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