XP media center edition won't boot up

[sherminator]

My Dell has XP media center edition. Here's the problem. The other day, my girl was on the computer and stepped on the surge protector by mistake and shut it off. Now the darn thing won't boot up. It gets stuck on the windows loading screen where the bars go back and forth on the screen.

It won't boot at all. Safe mode does not work, last known config does not work, and booting up normally doesn't work either. I hope someone has some ideas as to what to try to repair it. I don't have a cd. All I can do is restore to factory settings but then all of my music and pictures will be gone. I hope someone can help me get it to boot up.

I also tried putting the hard drive into another computer so I could at least back it up, but I can't get the computer to recognize the hard drive.

It has 2 gigs of memory, USB wireless Dell mouse and keyboard, and the hard drive is SATA.

I also tried putting another IDE hard drive into that machine and booted up to that but it still wouldn't see the SATA hard drive. I really don't want to lose everything. Help please...

[unlovedwarrior]

contact dell and have them send you the cds... and ask them what to do...

try making sure the computer is unpluged from the power and hold the power button in to discharge any left over power then open the case and look for a silver battery it looks like a watch battery near the mother board take it out for like 40 or so seconds and then put it back in and then try to restart your computer.

[sherminator]

I'll try that. I was hoping that someone could tell me of some third party software that I could use to repair my windows...

Or some way of backing up my data.

[unlovedwarrior]

try this

[sherminator]

I can't since I don't have the CD. It's a Dell and all I can do is revert to factory default settings.

I tried booting to a windows xp home edition cd I have from another computer to try and repair it with that but it would not see the SATA hard drive...

[unlovedwarrior]

contact dell and have them mail you the right cds they will i have done it plenty of times

[sherminator]

Do you know about how much they will charge for the cd's? The warranty ran out in march.

[unlovedwarrior]

ummm im not sure hopefully just shipping.

[sherminator]

Thanks a bunch. I'll try that.

[unlovedwarrior]

welcome keep us posted

[sherminator]

Before contacting DELL, I tried one more thing. I downloaded a bootdisk from bootdisk.com that allows you to see NTFS drives. Well I was able to see it so that's good. I installed another hard drive in the system so I could back up information from the C drive. It boots to a command prompt. I think I typed in xcopy c: d:\stuff /e

It did not copy the entire drive. Is there a switch or something I am missing to copy everything? I don't really need everything but I figured I'd copy the whole thing and then delete what I don't need. The 2nd hard drive is FAT32. I also tried copying certain directories but it doesn't seem to copy everything in the directory and doesn't copy any subdirectories...

Am I doing something wrong? I haven't worked with a command prompt in a looooong time.

[sherminator]

I fixed it! I booted up to the bootdisk with NTFS support, and when I couldn't copy the files that I needed, I just ran chkdsk on the C drive, and it fixed the problem. Booted up and all is good. I backed up the data right away.