Re: Safe Mode boot question

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"Ken" <Ken@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:h8j1tk$t1v$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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.

You chances of fixing her bad disk on your own PC are very slim. In the vast
majority of all cases, Windows XP will not boot when used on different
hardware. You could, of course examine the disk while it is connected to
your machine as a slave disk but again I suspect that you won't find out
what's wrong with it.

I suggest you do this instead:
- Get her to run herPC with the cloned disk.
- Connect the disk as a slave disk to your own machine.
- Get all her data files off it, including her EMail files.
- Copy them back to her cloned disk.
- Get her to re-install the various applications that she has lost.
About her data files: Does she back up her important files regularly? To an
external medium? If not then this is the time for her to review her backup
policy. This was a warning shot - next time she might lose the lot.


.

Relevant Pages

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