Help Me Obiwahn, You're My Only Hope!

[angearia]

So the Computer Death problem of my laptop seems pretty official, but it appears to be something with the OS which means I can hopefully fix it by reinstalling Windows. But I'm left with the dilemma of losing the data I hadn't backed up in the past few months. Yes, I fail. Yes, I know! But most of the stuff that I'd be sad about is already

Comments

[flake_sake]

Is a laptop or a desktop pc? Because if it's a desktop it's a piece of cake to get out the hard drive and connect it to annother computer to save your data, before you do the reinstalling.

If it's a laptop it's hard of course, but you could mayb try and let it do a recovery procedure or something. Do you know a computer scientist? They are usually handy in such situations.

[angearia]

It's a laptop. My roomie's guy is good with computers, but he didn't really offer the data recovery as a viable option for me. Which makes me guess he thinks it's unlikely or would take a godawfully long time.

[flake_sake]

Ah laptops, they're nice when they're behaving but when they aren't I always remember why I like computers that I can pry open from time to time.

Long distance diagnose is always shady, but what does it do exactly and what OS did you have running?

[angearia]

I have Windows XP Professional.

It started out just freezing where I had to forcibly shut it down. I downloaded new antivirus software, Norton, to scan it and it came back clean. Then Norton suggested I defrag it - not sure if that made it worse or not. But shortly after this, it crashed and now whenever it tries to boot up it shows a blue screen that says I need to uninstall anti-virus software, reverse defragmentation, or undo a backup utility (nearly word for word there).

[flake_sake]

You probably already tried that since it's the first move, but can you start windows in the save mode by pressing f4 during booting? Then you could kick out the software.

Also, did you buy the norton software? Because if you did, I'm fairly certain you can have them responsible in some way (though that's probably more trouble than it's worth).

[flake_sake]

Just read in the answers below, does it try to start windows at least or completely fails to boot?

[angearia]

It tries to start Windows, chugging away, then the Blue Screen appears.

[rahirah]

You can do the same thing with a laptop drive; I've done it. It's just harder to get the damned thing out.