Computer crisis

[Hawkmoon]

As of last night, the desktop computer was just fine (or so it appeared). It's an older Dell mid-tower, running Windows Xp. This morning, it wouldn't boot up. It went through POST, but when it started looking for the hard drive to boot, the light blinked a few times, I heard some clicks inside the box ... and nothing happened. Blank screen.

I assumed a dead hard drive and went to work. This evening I dredged up an Xp install CD and tried to run a repair. No joy. But I did find that I can access the Windows Repair Console ... not that I know what to do with it, but it shows me a C:\ prompt and I can read directories, so I know that both the motherboard and drive are fundamentally intact.

But ALL the files I know to look for -- MSDOS.SYS, CONFIG.SYS, IO.SYS -- show up with 0 (zero) bytes as the file size. Does this mean that something ate my boot files? Is there a way to recover, short of doing a "hard" reinstall of Windows and thereby wiping out my registry entires and application settings?

I need help, but please be gentle with me. I do NOT know my way around Xp and techno-babble will leave me hopelessly confused in a nanosecond.

Thanks in advance for any help ...

[AJ Dual]

The 0 byte size for those files is normal for win Xp, so that's not it.

What errors/failures did you get when you tried to do a repair?

You could try executing "FIXMBR" from the recovery console to re-lay the master boot sector records. Worst it'll do is fail, it won't ruin anything.

Otherwise if you hear "clicking" I'd just buy a cheap PATA drive (I assume this is old enough to not be SATA...) and install the old drive as "D:" to see if you can recover any data, like with the "freezer trick".

[Ben]

Clicking seems pretty indicative of a dying hard drive. I've recovered data before using the freezer trick, but used it as a last resort after conventional attempts failed. Besides what AJ suggested, you can also try putting a Knoppix or Ubuntu Live CD in to see if you can read and transfer data.

With clicking already evident, I recommend (if you don't have data backed up and you can still access the drive) immediately pulling off data in small chunks, important files first then working your way down to "oh well I lost them" files.

[lee n. field]

I heard some clicks inside the box

I assumed a dead hard drive and went to work.

Probably right, but

This evening I dredged up an Xp install CD and tried to run a repair.

Repair install or chkdsk from the recovery console ain't gonna fix it when you get to the stage where it clicks (or clunks, or twangs, or goes into a wind up wind down cycle, or goes deathly silent).

But ALL the files I know to look for -- MSDOS.SYS, CONFIG.SYS, IO.SYS -- show up with 0 (zero) bytes as the file size. Does this mean that something ate my boot files? Is there a way to recover, short of doing a "hard" reinstall of Windows and thereby wiping out my registry entires and application settings?

I need help, but please be gentle with me. I do NOT know my way around Xp and techno-babble will leave me hopelessly confused in a nanosecond.

Thanks in advance for any help ...

Get a new hard disk, do a basic install of XP on it, then and only then connect the old hd as a second and attempt to copy files off.

If it's flat dead, you're looking at about two grand on a data recovery, assuming your data is important enough to warrant that.