Win XP won't load - error messages

From the beginning -

I have a Dell Inspiron 9100. First the battery went into "temporary failure" which I understand to mean that I need a new one. Laptop runs fine on AC power.

Then I got the blue screen of death. Message was UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME. I ran the recovery console, which solved that problem.

Now, when Windows is loading, I get to the logo screen with the scroll bar thing that signals that it's loading. I get just a hint that it's headed for my desktop, and then the following error messages.

I click OK, seeing as how it's the only option.

Click OK, again, it's the only option.

Then "Restart" is my only option.

I don't want to lose what's on my hard drive, I have almost a year's worth of pictures of my children on there. My first purchase after fixing this problem will be an external hard drive, for sure.

I'd really appreciate if someone can talk me through fixing this. It's frustrating not being able to get into Windows, selecting Safe Mode or Last Good Configuration gets me to this exact same spot.

I'll answer any questions as soon as possible.

Thanks in advance!

 

It sounds to me like your hard drive is about to crash.
Either that, or the file system is dammaged, which most often is related to the same thing.

If you have important stuff on that hard drive, that you dont have backup of, I recommend you take your HD (or computer) to a computer shop where they'll probably have equipment to help you try and get the files off the computer.
If you're lucky you might be able to get some or all of it copied before the HD shuts down completly.

There's also a chance that nothing is physically wrong with the drive, in which case you can boot into the recovery console from the windows CD and run "chkdsk /r" to check and fix the file system, and perhaps this will solve the problem. If not, you can do a repair install of windows afterwards. A repair install will not affect documents and programs you have installed, only the OS iteself.
However, doing a "chkdsk /r" on a dammaged harddrive is often the last thing you do before it crashes completly, so I strongly recommend you try and get the files of the HD before attempting this.
Any half-decent computer shop should have USB equipent to hook the HD up to another computer so they can copy the files from there. A program like Unstoppable copier can also be usefull in these cases, as it doesnt stop copying if it encounters dammaged sectors, it just fills in a blank and keeps copying what it can.

Good luck!

 

Thank you so much. I've done the chkdsk /r thing already, so I guess it won't hurt anything to repair install with my Windows CD.

I was concerned that a repair install might clear out things that are on my hard drive, I've read some conflicting reports on that through Googling - but I don't know how reliable any of those sources are - I should have just come here first. I know better!

I'll do a repair install and report back.

 

"I was concerned that a repair install might clear out things that are on my hard drive"
I've done this on a lot of computers, and never had a case where documents were lost. It has happened a couple of times that programs have stopped working properly and needed re-installing, but that's only a minor issue.
I do backup documents, mail, etc pre-hand just in case though.

 

So here's a fun question. The laptop was set up for me by a friend of mine, and I didn't get the original disks from her because I had my own copies (like WinXP and the programs I wanted to run).

I'm using my WinXP disk from one of my desktops and I'm in the install section, and it is listing my partitions.

There are 2 options, 1 is C: partition1 [NTFS] 111463 MB <101385 MB free> and the other option is unpartitioned space 8 MB.

I'm not sure where to go from here, according to the Microsoft website I should be able to highlight my version of Windows and hit R to repair it, but when I hit enter after highlighting Partition 1 I get a message about installing 2 operating systems on a single partition.

Should I hit enter at that screen to continue setup - will I get the repair option at the next screen maybe?

 

Take a look at this image:
http://www.raymond.cc/images/r-key-to-repair-windows-xp.png

If you are using the correct CD, you will have an option to repair the current install by pressing "R". If you dont have this option, you'll need the original disk(s).
Are you using the correct version? You cant use XP Pro to repair XP Home for instance.
If you're being asked about chosing partitions and whether to format or not, then you are on your way to formating the PC!