Hi all,
Just to prove that when things are bad they can always get worse, the following happpend to my dell inspiron 600m:
– The AC power jack broke loose off the motherboard due to an accidental yank of the power adapter cord. So no AC power gets to the machine now.
– In trying to open the case to look if I could solder the power jack back on, I must have created a HD “event” which corrupted some of my internal HD.
Here are the symptoms now:
– XP (home) will not boot normally.
– Trying to boot off the original XP disk produces a message “Internal drive not found”
– I tried to connect the HD via a USB enclosure to another machine – it is not recognized..
However, the machine does boot in Safe mode and seems to be normal except that access to some (very few) files produces a read error (confirming some damage to the HD)
I would be grateful for any help with the following questions:
1. My first priority is to slavage some data off the HD. But when I connect an external USB HD in safe mode, it is not recognized. (Device Manager shows it, but it does not appear in Windows Explorer.) How can I move the data out of the machine in Safe Mode?
2. Any suggestions on how to try to boot in normal mode? My hypothesis is that the broken AC jack prevents the system from recognizing this hardware component
2. If possible I would like to slavage the whole environment and move it to a new HD. Any suggestions on if/how this could be done? Try to repair the disk? (Only 2 sectors appear damaged). If I can gain access to an exrenal drive in safe mode, perhaps a ghost program could be used?
Many thanks in advance..
