Data Recovery Forums - Help & Discussions

tgibbsftw · Joined: 09 Jun 2009 Posts: 1

So I was playing Counter-Strike, just minding my own business and killing people, when out of the blue my computer just reboots.

Windows XP begins to load, during the splash screen (with the loading bar) it just reboots again.

Then I'm prompted with the "Windows did not start up successfully" dialog, which I've tried every option on. Afterward, the computer is guarenteed to reboot every time it makes it to the Windows XP splash screen, but never before.

So I think the BIOS is okay... I'm assuming it's a bad sector in the hard drive?

I've run diagnostics that come with my computer (HP Pavilion) and everything shows 100% working fine.

So I figure I'd try and load up a Linux LiveCD and copy the files off onto my USB stick.

Ubuntu & Puppy Linux both freeze during their startup sequences as well. As far as I know, neither actually copies files to the HDD until you tell it to, and just runs from memory. So that makes me think maybe my RAM has gone bad?

But then if I load the Windows XP Setup CD, and make it to the HDD selection screen, it sees my hard drive as Unknown partition. So that makes me think maybe it's bad sectors in the HDD.

But diagnostics reveal nothing. I have not formatted the drive yet because I'm really trying to recover my data. I make music and all my music is on there, with no other copies... so I'd really hate to lose years of work.

Has anyone had similar symptoms? If so, what fixed it for you? If not, does anybody know what direction I might look in to begin recovery?

I've been recommended several recovery tools but none of them seems to work over a network... since I can't actually boot the PC in question in any operating system. (The closest I can come to usability is the Repair Command Prompt in the Windows Setup)

I do have other computers available, a laptop and a desktop (with IDE only, the HDD in question is SATA) as well as the ability to burn CD/DVD.

I do *not* have another hard drive of equal or greater size to copy the whole disk to, but I only need to recover a small amount of files, the rest I'd be willing to part with. The files I need could fit on my USB pen drive.

HEP MEH! I'm a software guy not a hardware guy :*(

I'll list all my parts if necessary, but TBH I didn't think it would make much of a difference. It's all factory parts that I haven't monkeyed with... only thing I've added is a new graphics card, and that was about a year ago... No hardware problems had arisen during that time.

Thanks a bunch,
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