Can it be salvaged?

my sis has broken her pc..... it got as far as the windows logo then......BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH!!!!!!! she got a friend to look at it who has now reported back to say "the pc is completely broke. On further investigation I discovered that the File Allocation Table is corrupt, it is not possible to retrieve any information from the disk" What does this mean??? she had info on there she couldnt really afford to lose. Her pc was formatted NTFS so could the FAT (i assume its File Allocation Table) be corrupt?

 

It's either FAT or NTFS - can't be both. Exactly what is the error message?

 

Exactly, its NTFS but she didnt get to see the error message, the BSOD just flashed up and it rebooted, kept doing this.

 

Assuming the problem actually is a corruption of the OS this should correct it:

If she has her WinXP CD, she could try a repair install of the operating system. I have recovered from BSH (BlueScreenHell) this way before, and more then once.

Don't use the repair console - opt to reinstall Windows. Then the XP CD will scan for and find the existing install on the disk, and give an option to repair it. Select the repair option. This way she will not lose any files on the drive (I never have).


Hope this helps!

 

This is good advice and I did it just the afternoon by following this link as my OS was behaving badly and I could'nt revert back to a "Restore Point":

http://www.informationweek.com/windows/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=189400897

Read it twice so you understand it and it only took about 1 hour.

 

I was thinking of doing that, as i have done it with my own with success, problem is she has Windows XP Home but no disk. I have Windows XP Pro, would this work or would it have to be the home edition?

 

I wonder if it is the dreaded MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION error? This will cause a BSOD and a reboot. This is generally a hardware fault and that hardware is IMHO nearly always a dodgy RAM stick.

If there is more than just one RAM stick in there you could try pulling them all bar one (if it stll BSODs try another stick.

And does your sister know anyone else with a PC - I'm wondering about slaving the drive to see if it really is trashed.