My desktop is sad and ill this morning, and I very much need to get into it to at least do a backup if I can.
Before going to bed last night, I shut it down. This morning, it started up without incident. I was browsing the web, and my hard drive started this weird clicking noise. It is best described by listening to Head damage #3 on
this page.. Though the clicks mine was making had longer intervals in between them.
A few moments after the clicking began, I clicked over to shut down, and it was froze up. I then got a small dialog box that told me there was an unknown disk error, and the computer turned off.
I restarted it then, and it was trying to boot from CD. I looked, and I had an office installation disk in the cd. So I took it out, restarted, went to the bios screen, and changed the boot order back to hard drive 1st, cdrom 2nd. I have no idea how it changed to that.
It will not boot from the hard drive. It hangs at this during startup:
verifying dmi pool data
It is a gateway, and has/had xp media on it. I have the factory disc that will take me into the XP Recovery console. But I really don't know what to do once I am there. At the c:/ prompt I have told it to chkdsk. It returns the msg that the volume appears to be in good condition and was not checked. I then have the option of running it anyway. I haven't done that yet.
Is there anyway for me to get into safe mode from where I am so that I can do a backup?
Or what are some things I can try from this recovery console to figure out what is wrong with my machine?
I REALLY appreciate any help/suggestions.
I also really want to try to grab a few things before trying the suggestion of
format c:
;)