Wife's Boss' Computer Problem

[Roebuc]

So my wfie's boss hears I am good at computers and sends his laptop home with her for me to fix. So I do not get her in bad light, I need a little help fixing his computer. I know how to re install windows which is what I think I need to do. His computer will not boot, you see the windows loading screen, it does it things, and right before its done loading, blue screen of death with an error message, and starts over. I looked at it for 5 mins when I was home on lunch, couldn't tell what the message said it was so fast but I am pretty sure I just need to reinstall windows right? If yes, how can I backup everything on his computer so I do not erase it all in case he didn't back it up on his server. By the way, I tried booting from Safe mode and last best configuration, all had the same result, blue screen of death for 2 seconds and bam re starting windows. It is Windows 2000 by the way. This is also my first post.

[jbennet]

get a windows 2000 cd and boot into recovery console (i think 2k has it, xp does)

also you might not have to do a full reinstall, a repair reinstall might do

speak to him first.

[TechTJ]

Hello
When you start the computer up you should go into the bios and there should something that says "Automatic Restart On Error"now that is on my computers but i think it depends on the verison of your bios along with what computer you have. But if you deselect it when the blue screen comes up it wont restart and it will stay there so you can read it,
If you can do that just post the error here and maybe we can help.
Hope this helps
Tech TJ

p.s (Be careful in the bios at what you change. Ask Questions if you need to)

[jbennet]

no, the auto restart on error thing is in windows -> control panel -> system -> startup (which he cant get into at the minute)

either way, you will need a win2k cd

[nikhil110]

if you want to see the msg on BSOD
press F5 or F8 you will get the advanced startup options.
select 'Disable automatic restart on system failure'
/*I am a new member i had the same problem recently.This is what i figured out on XP system.Hope it works for you*/
1.go to BIOS
2.Check if there is any option like 'SATA'.
Disable it.
3.now boot from your CD(press F6 to install RAID drivers) and goto Recovery
console.
4.log onto your account by pressing 1 or try some other number
5.enter your password if present.
6.At C:\windows\ type chkdsk and follow the instructions

[hughv]

You really need to see this error message.
In the past, I have done this by holding my finger over the "pause" key and pressing it quickly when the message appears. If it's really quick, you need to anticipate its appearance. This will work if you're patient enough.
If you really don't know how to get the files off the computer before re-installing, or how to boot to a recovery scenario, you should probably abandon this project. I say this because it's her boss's computer, and the result of a loss of data could have dire consequences.

[Roebuc]

Thank you everyone for your suggestions. I made a boot cd, tried to go into the recovery mode but thant ran into another error. I ran diagnostics on it and got the error 1000-0046 I think, I odn't have it in front of me but looked it up and means bad sectors in the hard drive. I tried one more time to boot from the disk, saw that the system 32 file was corrupt or missing, so I started the 4 disk sequence just to get another error that the hard drive was not responding and to restart, once I did that I was back at step one with the original problem, tried it one more time to make sure I didn't miss anything. After my research and talking to a dell tech, I confident the hard drive has failed. Unfortunatley I didn't have the right wires to try and copy his hd to either of my computers. I called him about it, he backs everything important up to his server and said he would just buy a new one.