My 'Puter is sick...HELP!!!!!!!!!!
 

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:

;)

It looks like you hdd is gone. Maybe u should try using 'Live win Xp' to backup your hdd!
Its a virtual xp that loads in ur ram.

Good luck man

Backups? They're what you're supposed to do BEFORE the problems start... :(

It's not sounding good. If it's a drive issue then it's unlikely things will be as easy as XP recovery. You should hope for the best, but prepare for the worst (a total loss of your data)

I will look that up and see if it is something that will work, thank you!

I have a full system backup, but it's about a month old. So I would like to try to update it if at all possible.

If the data is important, stop using the disk immediately. Take it out now to avoid further damage.

Either

1) Get a new drive and load the OS on that THEN mount the old drive as a slave drive and copy over all data using data recovery tools to your new drive.

or

2) *safest* Take it to a pro data recover service $$$

lol wtf 'duck quacking'?

Agreed, safest and best. It may be just the boot sector, not the data.. so get it booted from a new/other drive, and try to see whats on there that's good. Good luck, computer problems stink.. we can all relate.