ok i think i've stuffed my pc

not sure whats happened to it, but I am running Win2000 Prof on a AMD athlon thats about 3 years old.

It goes past the login screen and ALMOST boots up to windows, then freezes. Curiously enough, if you leave it for 5 minutes, the screensaver comes on and pressing CTRL ALT + DELETE brings up the Windows Task Manager. Which would kind of infer that its IN windows but as i said, the desktop doesn't show and its not the Windows wallpaper.

My Win2000 floppy boot disk does nothing, I have tried messing about with the CMOS boot order etc all to no avail.

I also got down my Win2000 CD in an attempt to repair. Well, it went through the first stage and said 'your computer will now be restarted'. It then got half way through the 'we will no install the basic components- keyboard, mouse etc' and a series of 'un-Microsoft certified' driver certificates came flooding up for the graphics card, sound card etc.
Erm and now its frozen again.

I don't want to erase it all as theres some data on there that I haven't backed up although all programs are on cdrs thank God.

Is there any way i can get into Windows again?

Regards

Rory

 

I've got a 'few hundred MB' HDD somewhere with 95 on it. You would put that in as master, yours as slave, and it would boot in 95...could it read your HDD?? I've no idea, do you know what sort of file system it is? You are welcome to try it if it's FAT16 or FAT32

I don't think it would cope with NTFS or whatever new crap is about..Buy another HDD and install W2000 from scratch, then use your old one as a slave. I feel happier having at least one more HDD around than you are using, for the £xx it costs

 

hi Graham
thanks for your reply. I am running NTFS and there are already 2 hdd's in the pc. One is the original 20gb Seagate and another is the 60gb Western Digital. I'd like to get rid of the Seagate but the computer isn't at all happy when its been removed. For that reason they've both got to stay in the machine i'm afraid.
Bloody Advents.

Thanks anyway
Rory

 

well i tried installing another Windows 2000 but in a different directory (also on the 60gb hard drive) and now it crashes on system startup.

Trying to boot the computer up with the Windows 2000 cd to freeze on 'Windows 2000 setup is examining your system setup'.

Well I was going to get a new pc anyway....

 

well i switched it off for an hour. switched it back on and it managed to install Windows 2000. So now I have 2 copies of Windows 2000 on the same hdd. One which works, and one which doesn't. Which is nice. And all my documents are saved too! The only things I've 'lost' are programs downloaded from the net. So i'm going to have to get a new browser (firefox is downloading as we speak ) but certainly no ICQ this time round. I think thats what stuffed it the first time. Oh, and ironically I think Norton Anti-Virus 2000 helped it too...