Windows XP safemode help

[jasc15]

Windows doesn't start normally.  After the Windows progress bar, there is just a black screen.  If I try safemode, It gets hung up on various XXX.sys files.  I have disabled 4 of these files (using my windows restore disk), hoping to remove the block they were causing, only to find another one blocking safemode, even if it is one that was no problem before.  The IT guy at work offered to give me a linux boot disk so I could at least access my hard drive to retrieve data, but I'm still hoping I can salvage this machine.

If it matters, it's a roughly 10 year old Dell Dimension 8200.

[slycordinator]

Spinrite from www.grc.com is supposed to be able to do a really good job at recovering data that's even in the bad sectors. And in this case it would move the data to good sectors and at least give you time to transfer to a newer disk that hasn't started dying.

On the other hand, it costs $89...

[Chino]

I had this issue with my Dell 4500 machine (8 years old). Mine was really fucked so I took out the hard drive and had a friend back up all of my data. I bought a used hard drive for like 20 bucks and put it in the tower. I forget what key it was, but right after the computer began to boot, I pressed either F8, F10, or F12. If it's salvagable, it will allow you to start windows from the last known working configuration.

[jasc15]

I have a second hard drive which isnt currently hooked up.  If I can get in with the Linux boot, I can transfer to that disk and just call the primary disk a lost cause.  Thing is, I'm not sure I'm at that point yet.  I want to try to salvage this since im not sure the master disk is shot.  After running a disk check, it came back OK.

[Metal]

Have you ran a check disk?  After getting the data off, I would probably do a chkdsk c: /f /x /r  and let it run, see what the results are.  If there's a ton of bad sectors, I would just consider the drive a wash and replace. 

[El Barto]

A: Are you sure it's hung up permanently?  I've had Windows hang for 10-15 minutes booting into safe mode before.

B: My experience has been that it's usually windows that's hosed, not the HDD.  If you went into the console, it should have run the checkdisk utility as soon as it booted from the CD.

C: Does Linux support NTFS now?  It's been years since I tried, and hopefully they've rectified that, but last time I tried to use it to backup up an XP formatted HDD it was no-go. 

[kirksnosehair]

Sounds like your hard drive is failing.  Do what Metal wrote if you can boot to a command prompt.    If it doesn't boot after running that chkdsk then it's probably toast.

Given the stated age of the machine, you've been on borrowed time for about 5 years as the MTBF on a typical PATA hard drive of that vintage is about 50,000 hours max (just under 6 years)

[jasc15]

I ran a chkdsk and it reported no errors.  It ran pretty quickly, so I wonder if it actually ran correctly.

A: Are you sure it's hung up permanently?  I've had Windows hang for 10-15 minutes booting into safe mode before.

I let it sit for several hours at one point to see if it was really hung up.  However, I only tried that before disabling the first XXX.sys file, not after removing the subsequent ones.

B: My experience has been that it's usually windows that's hosed, not the HDD.  If you went into the console, it should have run the checkdisk utility as soon as it booted from the CD.

When I first noticed the problem, it ran a disk check at startup, before i booted from the recovery CD.  Everything reported OK according to the check.

C: Does Linux support NTFS now?  It's been years since I tried, and hopefully they've rectified that, but last time I tried to use it to backup up an XP formatted HDD it was no-go. 

No idea.

Given the stated age of the machine, you've been on borrowed time for about 5 years as the MTBF on a typical PATA hard drive of that vintage is about 50,000 hours max (just under 6 years)

  I always figured I was well past operating life for this machine, but I never knew what a reasonable lifetime was for a HDD.

It might be time to break down and get a new one..

[slycordinator]

Linux has support for reading from and writing to NTFS through a program/package called ntfs-3g.

But recovering the data from the NTFS partition doesn't require using that. You can use dd, which'll copy the whole disk/partition over (albeit slowly since it copies *everything* on disk, including the "empty space.") Also, there are other imaging utilities to copy the partition over that'll be more user-friendly like gparted and it supports NTFS. And it'll likely be quicker than running dd, since I believe it's able to skip over the free space.