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formatted hard drive??

By Qmo ·
a computer at work was crashed by a power surge recently. when booting it, it goes all the way to the windows xp screen and then restarts. in an effort to recover/repair the computer i inserted an xp installation cd.i left the computer for 5 minutes while it was booting from the cd, on my return i found the screen showing a freed up partion...one of the workers had unfortunately started setup in an effort to assist me. when trying to boot from the hard drive now, it goes to the same windows xp opening/boot up screen (with the win xp logo) and then on to a plain blue screen and then switches off and reboots.
i slaved the hard drive in another computer and managed to at least recover emails and documents.
one IT professional told me that i need to format the hard drive and then install everything from scratch.
i would like to know though, is the hard drive really formatted seeing as it boots up untill the windows xp screen? should it not just be blank and asking for an os to be installed?
how can i recover applications? we had really critical and licensed applications. we do not have recovery cds or system images or applications backup for this particular computer.

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run check disk

by databaseben In reply to formatted hard drive??

more often than not, a power surge usually corrupts the file system, especially while system files are open at the time.

you should run a check disk with the fix option to re-index the file system, which will repair the mft, system files, registry, etc...

in regards to the new windows installation, its unclear how successful it was. i mean if you are lucky, that person didn't overwrite the initial installation and instead installed the recent o..s into a different folder (instead of the original folder). tif so, then the initial o.s. should be intact with the programs. but other than this, its hard to tell from our end what options you have at this time.

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other things to try...

by databaseben In reply to formatted hard drive??

i was thinking that maybe "maybe" there is a way to restore the initial installation if it was overwritten by the new installation. but i have never tried the method in such a case.

the method is to see if you can manually execute a system restore from the disk prompt. the success-fullness will depend if the new installation didn't erase system restore points.

you see, there may be shadow copies of the restore points and other files that you might be able to revitalize.

so the first step is to see if check disk repaired the hd and the system is functional

the next step is to see if that drive has 2 windows folder, 1 having the initial o.s.. if so then modify the boot ini to initialize the old o.s.

the next step is to install shadow explorer and scan that slave drive for shadow copies to restore, especially registry hive. however, shadow copies are used by system restore and they may not be there after the new installation was executed.

the next option to try is a manual system restore. see if by chance there are system restore points that were not wiped out via the new install -

http://pcsmarties.wordpress.com/system-restore-via-disk-prompt/

in none of the above pan out, then you have to accept the new installation as the new system in place.

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Try This

by HextWO In reply to formatted hard drive??

Try these steps to fix the rebooting problem...

Restart in XP Recovery Console
CD C:\Windows\System32\Drivers
REN ntfs.sys ntfs.sys.bak
COPY C:\Windows\I386\ntfs.sys .
Reboot

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Or this

by davep.l In reply to formatted hard drive??

A few months ago, a friend asked me to look at his pc which was randomly rebooting after he' had a power outage, but it did it mostly at the Windows screen ar as he was logging on. We backed up his data, and tried the recovery console option. Still the same problem, so I went for a full reinstall, still the same problem. Ran a diagnostics on the disk which reported - no problem! Tried changing the memory, cables and finally the power supply. This did the trick as the switching PSU had become damaged after the power out.

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