This laptop was working fine. All of a sudden it blue screened. After the blue screen, when we went to turn the laptop back on, it would get to the Dell home screen portion where you can opt to go into BIOS or the Boot Menu, and it gets past that fine, but it doesn't load the Windows load bar like it has been doing fine.
We are running Windows XP Pro on a Dell XPS M1330 laptop.
I can also get into BIOS fine, as well as the boot menu. Also, if I hold down F8, I can get into the Windows boot menu and choose to boot in safe mode, etc. When I try to do that though, the same thing happens. Black screen and no load bar.
First I thought maybe the video drives went bad or something with Windows XP, but I left it on until it might get to the point where the login screen comes up to see if maybe I could still here the login screen noise, but that didn't work as well.
We have some very important documents on here that, even if we cannot get the laptop to work again right now, we need to find a way to get access to anyway. It's imperative.
Any ideas of how to:
- Fix the laptop.
- Get the files off if we cannot fix the laptop.
UPDATE:
We let it wait for a while and we eventually got this message:
Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
<Windows root>\system32\ntoskrnl.exe.
Please re-install a copy of the above file.
How the heck do we fix that and maintain the current state of the hard drive?