Question
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Topic
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formatted hard drive??
Lockeda 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.