RE: Safe Mode boot question



"Ken" wrote:

My sister lives hundreds of miles away and had her hard drive become
corrupt. It would not boot into any mode from the boot menu, including
a prompt or Safe Mode. She has XP Home.

Since we had cloned her hard drive, I walked her through removing the
old one and installing the clone drive. Everything worked just fine,
but of course any changes made after the cloning of the original drive
needed to be restored.

I am suggesting to her that she ship me her corrupt HD so that I might
see if I can repair it for her. My hope was to take the corrupt drive
and place it as a slave on my computer to see if I could read the
NTBTLOG.TXT file to learn where it failed. If that worked, I hope to
replace the corrupt file with a good file.

I realize I could not boot into the GUIf I were successful, since I
know my computer is not identical to hers. My question is: Can I boot
into Safe Mode on my computer with her HD to see if I have reason to
believe I have fixed her problem? If not Safe Mode, would booting to a
prompt mess up the HD necessitating activation once I sent it back to her?

I have other options such as walking her through a cloning of the drive
she is presently using, but I am a little leery doing that over the
phone. I welcome all comments.


The first thing I would do is check the drive itself. Download the disk
testing tools from either the computer's maker or from the maker of the hard
drive. Have her put the drive back in the computer and run the health test.
If the drive is good, have her put the working drive back in the computer and
place the nonworking one in as a slave. She should then be able to access the
drive and copy any data off of it to the working drive.

Once she is satisfied that all is well, walk her through the cloning
process. Reclone the working drive to the nonworking one and she should be
back in business.

Consider having her buy an external USB hard drive and Acronis True Image.
It can make backup images to the external drive, and also can make clones to
another internal drive.

Christmas is coming up (already?), this might make a nice gift.
.

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