Hi,
I am having a frustrated time at trying to get my PC (Windows XP with Service Pack 2) booting up. Having booted up the day before, I suddenly got the following error after the dell splash screen,
Invalid Boot Diskette
Insert Boot Diskette in A:
In the BIOS settings, the boot order is hard-drive, cd-rom, then floppy (I have also tried changing the order). I first inserted a floppy boot disk, but the following message occurred,
Starting Caldera DR-DOS
HIMEM.SYS 2.34
Bad or missing command interpreter
Please enter a valid filename (e.g. C:\command.com)
After this failed, I decided to put in my XP CD, and it got to the installation options screen. I don't want to do a fresh install as I have data on the hard drive that has not been backed up. But when I try and do a Repair Installation, it goes to a screen where it recognizes my current hard drive, with the the total amount and free space available, but for some reason, its says this partition cannot be accessed.
Does anyone know why this happens? Is my hard drive locked or something? Does anyone have any ideas I could try.
I have looked at other forums and one possible solution is to go to the recovery console and type in the following,
FIXMBR C:
FIXBOOT C:
COPY CDDrive:I386NTLDR C:
COPY CDDrive:I386|NTDETECT.COM C:
BOOTCFG /rebuild
but I am not sure it will not corrupt any data I have saved on my hard drive. Can anyone confirm this? Is this a good solution?
Thanks