Thread: Help Please..My desktop crashed!

oh man! Chelsee!

This doesn't sound good. I'm not a hardware person though, so there might be hope. Hopefully someone here will have a suggestion. My mom has actually taken her computers to a repairman. That might be an option. Do you have an IT person at school who maybe moonlights fixing PCs?

I doubt anyone at school can help..I think I am the most computer literate person there..and thats not saying much. I've had it crash before and I had to reload it all but someone walked me through it on the phone..I can't remember if it was the people at gateway or where..but we did it all over the phone. I was able to retrieve everything before hand though...this time I can't even get on windows.

I've had to reload the original programming before too. If you think it's that bad, then you can probably do it yourself.

When you put the first disk in, it starts asking you questions.

I hate you might lose your pictures and other files :cry:

Sounds like you might have some "bug". I'd take the computer to a pro at this point. If they can get it up and running, I'd make sure I had three things in the future. A good virus protection program, an anti-spyware program and removable storage like a zip drive or a thumb drive. I can reload the programs but things like word documents, pictures, tax information etc. that I just can't do without go on my thumb drive or are burned on a cd. You might also try inserting the original windows disk in and then booting up. You might be able to re-install windows using the cd.

Well I tried these things tonight:

1) restarting in safe mode....didn't work
2) reinstalling windows from the CD..didn't work
3) starting the computer with my Norton emergency diskand definitions disk I created the last time the computer crashed. It said STARTING WINDOWS....LOADING NAVDX...USING VIRUS DEF FROM A:\ ..USING OPTIONS FROM A:\ then it went through SCAN MEMORY...OK SCAN MASTER BOOT...OK SCAN BOOT RCORD...OK... and now its running through SCAN FILES..its been going about 45 minutes but it is working through it...do you think I'll be able to retrieve my files? I want to get at the very least our digital photos of the kids,

I;m hoping I can and then I may strip the whole computer down.

We;ve been having a time with it lately..we had Norton on it and a adware sweeper program on it but in recent months have jsut been pummeled with adware and popups..it was downloading a new home page and putting porn on our fav menu... we knew it was headed for a fall but didn't know how to stop it..I had done everything i could think of except reload it..which I was planning on doing as soon as I had time... I guess I need to make time now,.

I finally got norton to scan it and it found no virus..but it definatley has something...I accidentally ran the scann again so I won't know till morning what it will do, or won;t do next... thanks for the advice guys,..I'll keep you updated.

First off, which version of Windows are you using?

If you can get a DOS prompt type the following:

C:\dir /s *.jpg

Hit enter

If your digital photos are jpegs your screen will display all the digital photo file names on your pc. This will scroll by fast but it will tell you if your photos are still on the hard drive. Unless you deleted your hard drive they should still be there.

If they are gone you will get a message "file not found."

If you are using Windows XP, you can do a system restore to a time when it was functioning properly.

i WUV XP

It is win 98.
I tried your suggestion BSR but it says bad command or file name.

After Norton scanned on the emerg. disk it says startup.exe and command.exe is missing or corrupt...Is that bad?