Windows XP experts... who knows what this is?
 

Hi there,

All the sudden i had a "explorer.exe" error and my screen went dark. I was forced to restart by pushing the reset button on the tower. The Intel motherboard splash screen hangs like 3 minutes, then i get a black screen with nothing but this: "Reboot and Select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device".

I have NOOOO clue what the fuck to do now, i got into the BIOS and looked around a couple times but I dont know jack shit about that kind of stuff.

Im about to format C:

Am I doomed?

This is on another machine, btw... i cant get it booted up! :(

No clue but here is a bump maybe someone here can help :(

yikes , good luck man

I've never been through that before, but I guess you'll have to format, sorry to hear :(

Head into your BIOS settings and see what device (ie. CD Rom, 3.5 floppy, Hard Disk) is your boot drive. Make sure it is set to your HD. Try a reboot. If that doesn't work, try doing the same thing and switching the 1st boot device to either A) the startup bootdisk 3.5 you were SUPPOSED to make (hehe) or B) your CD ROM drive and throw in your XP CD. Troubleshoot from their. Virus Scans, Scandisk, etc. Good Luck!:thumbsup

Typical harddisk crash. Good luck.

yup, looks like ur hd is gone :(

Yes that my :2 cents: to

Shit, that's a bummer. Maybe I'll backup my files right now, just in case....

Good luck :thumbsup

http://bootdisk.com/

also you can go to google and use the term "bootdisk" .

that should get you started.

then check the bios.

Make your backup now. I guess format c: will be your only choice.

I dunno man, I lost everything this week too:(

I threw in the XP Pro CD and windows setup ran. I tried to repair windows instead of setting up a wwhole new OS but it says: Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer. Make sure any hard disk drives are powered on and properly connected to your computer...." "Setup cannot continue."

:helpme

ps. does this mean all the data on those drives are gone for good?

most likely

find out what brand HD's you got in there and dl their diagnostic tools.

Yup sounds like it. There are places that can usually recover your data but you are looking at thousands of dollars. If the data isn't that important then don't spend that kind of money.

Also, what I would try next is get another known good drive. Make that your boot device, put the old drive on the secondary bus and bring up the computer. See if windows can see the drive as a data drive. If so then get all your data moved off. If not, then RMA the drive if it is still under warranty.

It kinda sounds like your system partition has crashed ? or is toast ...aka caput

yikes!! isnt there some kind of service i can call to come out?? computer rooter or anything? fuck

open the Case and try to reset the cables then go into setup
and try to find the drive if you cant find it your MBR is gone google
for tools to try to fix if not sorry time to get a new drive.

i would install a new hard drive, then use the original hard drive as a slave, you may be able to access the files that way.

Not sure if this tells anyone anything... but when looking around in the BIOS, it appears as something is not right here (sorry its so dark)

http://www.occash.com/misc/003.jpg

Hmm... looking at that screenshot, I'm pretty sure it's something on your harddrives chip-board that's broke.

The only other thing I can think of is if your cabling (or some connector) is poor/defect or if you've messed up the jumpering on it or another device.

Chip-board errors can happen if you've either had the bad luck to get a shitty drive to begin with, but also if it's been working under higher temperature than it tolerates.

The BIOS would report the drive at least somehow otherwise, no matter the state of the actual disk/MBR etc.

If it's something on the chip-board, the easiest thing you can do (not-so-easy though) is to get another drive from the exact series with an exactly similar board... and move that new board onto the top of your old drive.

Good luck, hope it works out!

Clear the BIOS by yanking the battery from the motherboard. That will reset it back to its default settings, might help.

explorer.exe, in addition to being Windows Explorer, is your shell, by default. When it crashes, you lose your start button and all that. To get it back, you simply pull up the task manager (ctrl+shift+esc) and do a File--New Task. Enter Explorer. Your shell will restart.

If the problem persists, [re]install the latest service pack of your operating system. If you install a service pack with any instances of iexplore.exe running, explorer.exe may be prone to crash. Personally, when I install service packs, I purposely kill my shell during the install.

ganga,

the easiest way to check if you can still recover the data from the hard drive is to hook it up as a secondary drive to another working computer. then you can just transfer the data to the primary hard drive. if you can't do this then something is physically wrong with the hard drive itself and the data is basically lost. i do have programs that can recover data from the uncorrupt sectors but since i'm no where near where you live i can't help.