A relative’s WinXP SP 3 Dell Desktop will not boot beyond the segmented bar. I have slaved the hard drive to my laptop (via a USB IDE device), and it IS recognized and I can access it, and run Malwarebytes and AVG scans against it. I’ve cleaned up everything they found (rootkits, viruses, trojans), but it still doesn’t get beyond the segmented bar. So, at least, I WAS able to recognize the drive. I put in a WinXP master disk (not one that went with this particular PC), and ran the Recovery Console, then the FIXBOOT and then BOOTCFG /REPAIR commands. No change.
I want to run the FIXMBR command, but it gives me a scary “this may make your disk partitions unreadable” statement. Since I don’t have the ability (at this time) to backup all the data on the HD, I’m a little afraid to run the FIXMBR.
I’ve done some research on-line, but I’m not feeling comfortable. Any suggestions?