I have a nice Dell desktop bought in 2001 that came with Windows XP. I use a firewall, a virus program, DSL access, and actually run adware and a similar program every couple weeks. I ran them both yesterday in fact. Last night it crashed on me and won't come back. When I turn the computer on I get my wallpaper background for about 1 minutes without any program icons and then this Welcome screen popped up and I was supposed to click on my name but when I did that it logged me in/saves settings/logged me out again. So I called Dell and they put it in safe mode and the Welcome screen came up with 2 choices: my name and the administrator. When I clicked on administrator it did the same thing, logged in/logged out, back to the welcome screen again.
So Dell says it is all gone and I have to start over. He said he would call back tonite and walk me thru restarting it.
Does this sound like the right course of action?
Posts: 1990 | Registered: Feb 2001
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posted
Well, if there was stuff on the drive that you need to recover, you could always buy a new hard drive, make it your primary, install XP on it, and then, once the machine is up, pull the data off of the original drive.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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posted
There's no way he could know its all gone from that information. In fact, it sounds rather like a good chunk of it is there.
What I would do is take it to a local computer place, tell them you think the drive's windows installation is borked, but that you'd like the data, and pay the few hundred dollars to get the data off, if its worth that to you. Likely all they'd have to do is put it in as a slave drive on another system and copy your files off.
Do not follow Dell's advice if you want to save that data, do not.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
Tap F8 while the computer is booting up. Choose Command Line Prompt scanreg /restore Choose a date before all this stuff started happening.
If you have a boot floppy, try booting from it.
If neither of those things work, do you have information that you really need on your hard drive? If so, before letting Dell reformat your drive and reinstall windows, take your computer to a computer store and let them get the info from your hard drive first. It shouldn't be hard and shouldn't be expensive, as in no more than 50 bucks.
Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
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posted
I concur with these guys. Just the fact that safe mode showed SOMETHING relating to you (log in screen with your name), even if it won't actually log in, shows that there *may* still be hope.
Posts: 5422 | Registered: Dec 2001
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The fact that it gets as far as the registration screen tells me your hard drive isn't trashed -- just maybe your operating system -- or maybe profiles? Since it actually gets to the stuff where it wants you to choose a profile, then does it's quirk, I wonder if there is a way you can remove the profiles....Hmmm...
But doing an operating system re-install should not lose all your data. So I think that tech was just looking for the easy way out instead of trying to find a way to save your data...
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Fugu, I seriously doubt the hard drive is screwed up to the point that the file system isn't readable, in which case she should just be able to have the store make her drive into slave drive on a working computer and then save the info to cd, which should in no case cost hundreds of dollars.
Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
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posted
Most places I know of have a minimum data recovery charge of around $150, which is where the figure comes from, I'm pretty certain that (if anything) only the windows install is borked, not the filesystem.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
[Nothing to add but my sympathies to Theca for having to deal with this.
Actually, this thread is exactly why I am so fervently glad to be a part of a supportive community. I don't think y'all are speaking English, but it sounds effective. However, Sumerian pictographs would also impress me in this regard. ]
Posts: 2919 | Registered: Aug 2004
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posted
Thanks for the advice, I'm too busy to really read it right now but I'll be looking at it more over lunch. I don't have anything on my hardrive I have to have. I will lose my digital photos that I took in 2004 unless I sent my dad a copy more recently than last December, I need to ask him. I will lose certain other minor files and papers. And my will program that had a lot of data on it. Plus all my programs will have to be reinstalled if I start over. But I can do that, it's not that big a deal to lose everything. I did save program files and pics in December 2003 so I will have some stuff when I start over. I just don't want to start over unless I have to.
Posts: 1990 | Registered: Feb 2001
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posted
Are you sure that's all Dell says you can do? I'm have a similar crash and although it looked grim using another computer and a forcible rescue program, pretty much everything I had was saved...?
I have a tech savvy father/brother though so I had lots of help.
Posts: 8473 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
I'd advise putting the hardrive in as a slave in another computer, and copying over what you can.
Generally computer help desks tell you to reformat to matter what the problem is. It generally solves most problems...even if it is overkill. Sort of like killing someone who you don't like. Sure, it ends the conflict with them...but there are a lot less severe ways of dealing with the problem.
In the future make sure you back up everything that is important to you. If you hard drive has crashed once...it might be something wrong with the physical media, so it might crash again and again.
Posts: 1901 | Registered: May 2004
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posted
Sounds like a similar problem I had a while back on another computer. What happened to me was someone b0rked up my login settings. A Restore program fixed that (I think it was GoBack). IF the HD has to be formatted then there IS hope of recovering SOME of the photos and other things you might want to keep. EZRecovery will pull SOME things (Like pictures, text docs. etc) from a formatted HD. Even one that has been formatted several times. (I have pulled pics off Susies old HP AFTER reformatting it a couple times AND installing Win2K from the original Win98 that she had on it)
EDIT: One thing (at least MY version of EZR) will NOT recover is MP3s. Nerwer versions may.
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Dell outsourced their tech support to India about a year and a half ago. I found out when I called for help on a defective drive. I am a computer geek - a mini-geek, really, especially next to my programmer husband and brother. But I know a helluvalot more about computers than 95% of all computer techies I've ever run accross, and that includes Dell. The first five people I spoke to couldn't get the fact that I'd already tried all the elementary stuff like ten times each, et cetera ad nauseum. And when I listed to them everything I'd done, they flip through their books or screen shots or whatever as they pause to figure out if what I'd said made any sense. Which, to them, it evidently did only after five or ten minutes of reading. Did not instill any confidence in me at all.
In short, the guy's probably an idiot, like so many of them over at Dell's support centre in India. So before you start wiping the hard drive, make a huge fuss, ask for a manager or supervisor, and go over your options with them. But do not, under any circumstances whatsoever, listen to the first idiot you speak to.
Oh yeah. And take the computer to a local computer place to get your data off it. I've done that before with a laptop hard drive - no problem. It cost me something like $50 Cdn about five or six years ago - it was only a half hour jobbie total. But do it.
Posts: 8355 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
Ah, well! Maybe my rants to them helped after all. I sure did write some nasty letters to them about it.
Posts: 8355 | Registered: Apr 2003
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You know, at least my gateway tech support was from the US AND told me how to get a new hard drive cheaper than they were charging and to install it myself as it was also cheaper and easier.
Anyway.
THAT'S what happened to you last night.
Yeah, sounds more operating system than hard drive. But these guys know better than me.
Posts: 14745 | Registered: Dec 1999
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That happened to me. Well, sort of. Actually, they called and said that they had backed up all my pictures (which were the only files I cared about) on a CD. Six visits to CompUSA later (and on all six visits they said they definitely had the CD), they said my hard drive had been so screwed up they had been unable to save anything. So I lost all my pictures from senior year.
posted
Are computer stores open on saturdays? Because that is the only day I could possibly do it.
So if I go to a computer store for help saving stuff, can they also help me keep from having to start over?
If I just give up and start over how much can I salvage after? I'll have to put every single program I added back again one by one right?
Just doing it Dell's way will be a lot faster. See, I'm trying to figure out if there is enough incentive for me to put off doing it Dell's way tonight. But I don't want to be without my computer and I have so little time to play with it that I'm tempted to just do it Dells way.
BTW the guy I spoke to had a British sort of accent but the connection was TERRIBLE. And it was 9:30 am there and 11:30 pm here, or something similar to that. I assumed he was in India at the time.
Posts: 1990 | Registered: Feb 2001
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posted
Oh man, and I've actually been afraid to call Dell support because I was afraid of having to talk to an Indian. Why it would terrify me so much... I guess I have a higher incidence of guys with accents calling to schedule massages and getting really creepy. It's harder to establish a boundary when you don't know where someone is from. And if they told me to do something like reformat my hard drive I'd be quicker to do it because I wouldn't want to offend them. I'm stupid, I know.
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
Thanks so much for the information, everyone. I'm still pretty confused so I think I'll print this page and call my aunt when I get home. She knows a lot more about computers than anyone else I know in real life. I'll be here at work a couple more hours btw if anyone has anything else to add.
Posts: 1990 | Registered: Feb 2001
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posted
Theca, head over to the forums at GreNME.com and, if David Bowles' very similar thread over there doesn't make things clearer, post and ask for help. There are a number of people over there that would probably be willing to walk you through what you need to do step by step over the phone if need be, and I guarantee that they'll be better at it than Dell tech support.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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I did have to start my computer over from scratch. It's going pretty well except that I am having trouble accessing certain websites with IE 6.0. Take ebay for example:
This is just an example of what ebay looks like to me now. Even when I am signed in it looks that bad. I have a yahoo!browser that works fine, just the IE browser won't work. But I LIKE IE. Any suggestions on how to fix IE?
Posts: 1990 | Registered: Feb 2001
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It sounds like IE's security settings are set high (which, being so, will help you from contracting the same problems again, but which interfere in your regular browsing). I could likely muddle through getting your security settings set up with a good compromise between the two, but not remotely. And even if I did, I recommend Firefox, which will keep you from getting the same problems again plus being a just plain nicer and more customizable browsing experience than IE.
Open IE, then go to Help->About Internet Explorer, and check what it says the encryption level is (it should be 128 bit).
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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