Help please!

I have a Packard Bell iMedia 5044 AMD Athlon XP 1700+ given to me by a relation because it’s “gone wrong”. In his words, the screen became scrambled and it would not re-start. Anyway, he took it to the local PC repair shop and they charged him a small fortune to tell him he needed a new computer. That’s how I’ve got it.

It was running XP with no problems at all prior to it “failing”. I’ve started it up and it goes to the C:\ prompt. Windows doesn’t appear to start. I’ve typed in win (as per another post on the forum) but it says it’s a bad file name or something similar. (What does puzzle me though is it flashes up the windows 98 screen prior to coming to the c prompt and also says on the black screen that it’s windows 98. How can this be? He never had windows 98 – only XP ???? that was pre-installed when the machine left the factory)

I also have the red recovery floppy disk and two cd’s that he burnt to “restore” the system, but when I run them the process freezes just at the end of cd 2.

Can anyone suggest how I can get it going and if any of the documents/files on the pc will be recoverable?

Many thanks

Perhaps the repair guy tried to load 98. Who knows what he did?

If he did not format the drive you should be able to access the data by slaving it in another computer.

Here is that model:

http://support.packardbell.com/uk/it...&pn=P700402301

Not sure if a new BIOS would help but it is an option.

When you run the Recovery CD it just freezes? No error message? Does it say what it is trying to do when it freezes? e.g. Loading Settings? Finalizing? etc.

Thanks for the info. I'll check out the link today.

The 2nd cd just freezes, a light green box comes up on the screen with no writing in it and that's it. It does say its extracting a file named DMC0001 or similar on the bottom left of the screen.

Does that make any sense ?

I cannot find any info on a file DMC0001.

If the repair guy tried to load 98 it is hard to imagine what damage was done to the original XP.

A BIOS reinstall might help if you cannot track down this guy and try to find out what exactly he did.

If he formatted the hard drive then XP was wiped out and the Recovery Disks will not find what they are looking for.

If this is the case you will need to reinstall a new Operating System.

Hi jephree.

I ran the recovery disks again and the system froze when it was trying to "extracting DMO001AC.XX
Does this mean anything ?

If I buy a copy of XP will this restore the OS and keep any documents etc or is there a program that will undelete any wiped information ??

Thanks

I do not find DMO001AC.XX or anything like it on my retail XP disk so I am assuming that it is a Packard Bell file.

If you load a new operating system you may be able to create a new partition to load (XP) on which will leave the rest of the drive untouched. It really depends on how that drive has already been partitioned.

It would be best to wipe the drive and start fresh. You can extract any data that you want by first off slaving the drive on another computer and extracting what you want.

Sorry, the DMO file was being extracted by the Packard Bell recovery system cd's.

I have ran XTREE on the machine and there are files on there, but I'm not sure how relevant they are.

Do you have any links to a good (easy to follow) article on slaving hard drives ?

XTREE would be seeing 98 DOS files.

Unless there was something on this hard drive that you definitely want I would just let XP format it from scratch.

Slaving it just means putting it on another computer as a slave drive where you can access the data.

There are jumpers on the back of drives for either: Master/ slave/ Cable Select

The end connection on a IDE (ribbon) cable is black/Master whereas the middle connection is Gray/slave. If the Main drive (Master) is jumper set to Master then set the second to slave. Or set both to Cable Select where the black plug will show Master and the Gray=slave.

You can also do this just by temporarily replacing the connection to your DVD/CD drive (Secondary Master) to this drive you wish to access. Therefore both would be Master: one Primary and the other Secondary.

http://groups.google.com/groups?sour...ve&sa=N&tab=wg

http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...ing+hard+drive

Thanks for the info.

Did the temporary option by connecting in place of the DVD/CD Drive, changed the jumpers as suggested and backed up what was left on the disk to my other HDD.

I guess you're right. It looks like an OS re-install !!!

Hi jephree and everyone.

I've managed to get this pc booted just by restarting loads of times and pressing F8 at various stages. I now have the timing down to an art !

Problem is even though I can get it to boot (in an unorthodox way), when I shut it down and restart I get the c:\ prompt again with no attempt to boot.

Can you suggest anything ? Could it be the boot.ini file or is there something within XP that I could use to check/diagnose??

Thanks again.