Is it stuffed

[asimov (John)]

Had a similar problem only last night on a 5 year old Toshiba A100 So I had to do a clean install (XP) using the recovery disk.

First thing you need to do is get into the BIOS & change your boot device order, so that it boots from your DVD player.

[Cosmic (Daniel)]

Ron if you end up reinstalling windows, I have a program to recover lost data....even if the hard drive is formatted or not. Let us know the final outcome and will try get all your docs back if there real important.

Dan

[OzRob (Rob)]

Maybe remove the hard drive from the computer and see what happens when you turn the computer on.

[higginsdj]

Originally Posted by astroron

Thanks guys,I cannot get into safe mode
I cannot get past
A disk error occurred
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart,
If I put in the XP disk it takes me all the way through the install system then asks me if I want to repair or install another widows,if I install another windows I will loose all my stuff and be back to square one
When I do the repair it tells me it has tried and failed
The computer is a compaq 6220
cheers

If you are still getting this after using a boot CD then either your CD drive is not working or the BIOS has the HD booting ahead of the CD (which is bad) OR you are not using a bootable CD (most likely problem).

In any case your HD is likely to be cactus and you can buy a new laptop HD (2.5") and install it (usually 1 screw on the underside to remove the HD cover and then just pull the 2.5" drive out then just reverse the process to install the new one). Take the old drive in to someone who can attempt a recovery. Recovery is hit and miss depending on how bad the HD is. I take it you didn't keep a backup of your drive that you could clone from?

Cheers

[mill (Martin)]

Ron just download Hiren's boot cd and boot from that.
It has loads of recovery programs and this way you can save most of your data to an external usb harddrive.
Go here for the download http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download.html
And scroll down to the bottom and click on the download link "hirens.bootcd.12.zip"
Burn this onto a cd and start up from it.you can even start up into windows xp and linux.

[RobF (Rob)]

How did you go Ron?

[astroron (Ron)]

Originally Posted by RobF

How did you go Ron?

Hi Rob,I have not attempted to do anything as I cannot get past the original screen I started this thread with.
so have basicly given up for the time being

[RobF (Rob)]

Does sound "hard drive'ish" from what you've described. Might be worth investing in an external drive for backup images of your PCs.

If you can burn a CD (or USB stick) on the other computer (I think you have one in the office?) that sounds like the only way you will be able to progress any further. You might get far enough to be able to copy data off, then reformat/install windows etc if worse case as per all the suggestions above.

Did you get a Windows CD with the computer?