Compaq laptop refuses to boot into Windows

[NotThereAnymore]

Since yesterday, I have been having some serious problems with my Compaq Presario 2100 laptop (AMD Athlon XP version). Whenever I used this laptop it would run fine for about thirty minutes, then it would display the Blue Screen of Death with a message mentioning the atapi.sys driver. At first, I thought it was a virus but the virus scanners I have did not come up with any viruses. I ran sfc/scannow to see if there were any corrupted files in the system, but it turned up with no response of any problems. Then, I uninstalled a virtual CD driver program called Daemon Tools as a suggestion from a friend of mine. This temporarily solved the problem, but when I turned on my laptop today, it could not load into Windows (Windows XP Home Edition SP2). Instead, it now shows the usual loading screen, then it displays the Blue Screen of Death with a new message which I can not read because it quickly flashes off to reboot the laptop again. I do not know what is causing this and I am afraid to reformat my hard drive because I have some important documents on my laptop. If anyone could help me, it would be much appreciated.

[viperman224]

How much computer experience do you have? When I get a laptop in my shop I usually take the hard drive out and use a special plug I have that allows me to plug the hard drive into my desktop computer and retrieve the data. Unfortunatly, If you do not have much experience with computers or laptops it's kind of out of the picture for now. The other option would be to download a copy of Knoppix (free Linux live on cd), burn it on a cd, and put it in your cd rom drive. Then boot the machine and you should be able to see any files on your hard drive and possibly back them up to a thumbdrive or some other means of media. It could also be that you corrupted a file when you removed the virtual CD drive Daemon Tools, Can you boot the laptop into safe mode? To do this, turn the machine completly off, turn it back on, at the windows xp screen press the F8 button. There is also an option to "restore windows to the last known working configuration" which would restore windows to the last configuration that worked. These are the only options I can think of right now short of doing a full reload/restore of windows. Good Luck.

[Thong_Ispector]

Viperman,
I have one of those adapters but I am not sure which is pin #1 on these drives. I have three drives and not one shows which pin is #1.

Is pin #1 towards the "Jumpers" or away from the jumpers..

Examples...
Drive info.. Toshiba hdd2731
Drive info.. IBM DARA 209000

[NotThereAnymore]

How much computer experience do you have? When I get a laptop in my shop I usually take the hard drive out and use a special plug I have that allows me to plug the hard drive into my desktop computer and retrieve the data. Unfortunatly, If you do not have much experience with computers or laptops it's kind of out of the picture for now. The other option would be to download a copy of Knoppix (free Linux live on cd), burn it on a cd, and put it in your cd rom drive. Then boot the machine and you should be able to see any files on your hard drive and possibly back them up to a thumbdrive or some other means of media. It could also be that you corrupted a file when you removed the virtual CD drive Daemon Tools, Can you boot the laptop into safe mode? To do this, turn the machine completly off, turn it back on, at the windows xp screen press the F8 button. There is also an option to "restore windows to the last known working configuration" which would restore windows to the last configuration that worked. These are the only options I can think of right now short of doing a full reload/restore of windows. Good Luck.

I remembered that I had a copy of Knoppix (v. 3.6) in my CD book and I decided to use it in an attempt to get access to my hard drive. Unfortunately, my computer also refused to boot into Knoppix (at that point, I wanted to strangle someone at Compaq). I would try the idea with using the plug but I do not own one of those devices. I'm going to try and get a newer version of Knoppix and see if that doesn't work.

[viperman224]

Viperman,
I have one of those adapters but I am not sure which is pin #1 on these drives. I have three drives and not one shows which pin is #1.

Is pin #1 towards the "Jumpers" or away from the jumpers..

Examples...
Drive info.. Toshiba hdd2731
Drive info.. IBM DARA 209000

My adapter is keyed so I can not plug it in backwards. I Believe though, that pin one does go towards the jumpers.

DaMoogle - How old is your laptop? Is it under warrenty? My thinking would be to send it back to them and see if they could do it. Unfortunatly if it's not it would probably cost a lot of money. Even if they did restore windows, I highly doubt that they would get your data of your hard drive which still leaves you with a problem.

[NotThereAnymore]

My adapter is keyed so I can not plug it in backwards. I Believe though, that pin one does go towards the jumpers.

DaMoogle - How old is your laptop? Is it under warrenty? My thinking would be to send it back to them and see if they could do it. Unfortunatly if it's not it would probably cost a lot of money. Even if they did restore windows, I highly doubt that they would get your data of your hard drive which still leaves you with a problem.

I remember getting my laptop near the end of August in 2004. I would send it back to Compaq, but from what I have seen from their prices, it would cost just as much to fix it as it would to pay for a new one. I'm thinking of perhaps sending it to CompUSA, but I don't know if their services would fix a laptop and manage to save its data.

[viperman224]

They probably would save your data, but, they charge extra and from the few times I buy parts from them I think they charge more then some of the machine are worth. I think your better chance would be finding a local tech. and having him/her looking at it. But that depends on where you live and if there is anyone around to look at it.