Hi,

I hope someone can help me, i have been downloading a few things to try and sort out my iPhone which died on me recently, and this morning my pc running XP stopped working properly, i could not open any programs, ctrl, alt, del was did not work either. I tried to reset, which it did but it will now not load up, it sounds like it is going to start as normal but then the monitor just goes black and nothing else happens. So i am a little worried that i downloaded something funny, which has now wiped my hard drive?

Please Help!

I tried to reset, which it did but it will now not load up

What do you mean by this? What did you reset and how?

Do you have a XP Install CD?

Thanks for responding!

I reset the pc by pushing the reset button, its quite old, a P4 i think.

I have been looking for it but i cant fid it anywhere. I am going to look at trying to get one today, or one of those system reboot disks... is that something you would suggest?

When you say "reset", do you mean RESTART the machine?

Yes, sorry I restarted it. Still nothing today.

From what you said, you actually pushed the "Reset" button on the computer, right? A lot of older ones had this, newer ones do not.

I suspect you have a corrupted file system and need to run chkdsk. You are going to have to get into BIOS Setup on your computer to set the CD/DVD drive as the first bootable device, so you can then boot your XP CD, unless it provides the ability to press a Fn key at boot time to bring up the boot selection menu. If it does, use that.

How you do this varies with each manufacturer. Normally you press F1, F2, F10 or Del when you see the manufacturers logo. Often there is a clue somewhere on the screen when you boot normally telling you what key to press. Some computers (most newer ones) have a key you can press (often F12) to bring up the Boot Menu from where you can select the CD/DVD drive to boot from.

If you don't have an XP CD, download and run ARCDC by Artellos. It will download the required files from the Microsoft Web site and create a .iso file. It will also offer to burn the iso image to a CD for you. If you don't do it then, there is a good freeware burner called ImgBurn which will do it at a later time. If you're unsure how to do this, you can follow the tutorial here: How to Burn an ISO File

Boot the CD and at the first opportunity, enter R to start the Recovery Console.

Next, choose which XP installation you want to login to. Normally this will be 1.
Lastly you will be asked for the Administrator password. Just press the Enter key as the Administrator does not have a password (unless you gave it one, then you would enter it).

From the command prompt, enter: chkdsk /r
Allow it to complete undisturbed. It can take an hour or more depending on the size of the hard drive.

Remove the CD, type exit and the computer will reboot. Hopefully that will have fixed the problem (corrupted file system).