I have a computer where it receives an error message upon startup from the SMART monitoring predicting that the primary master may have imminent failure and to please back up all data. Then it states to press F1 to continue or DELETE to enter setup. If you press F1 it just reloads the same page and error message. Press DELETE and you go into the BIOS. No where are you given an option nor will the computer boot normally into windows. Also unable to boot into Safe Mode. I went into the BIOS to disable the SMART monitoring in case that was preventing the computer from booting into Windows. Lo and behold, SMART is already disabled. I enabled it and then rebooted. Same message, same problem, unable to boot into Windows. Went into BIOS and disabled SMART, no change upon reboot.
The computer seems to be in this error loop with no option to boot into Windows XP. The user has not backed up any files since March 2007. We need to access the hard drive in order to do a back up.
This all happened after the user did Windows updates and then the computer automatically shut down for a reboot.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to boot the computer into windows? The Windows XP disks that the computer came with have been misplaced but are being searched for as I type this. Other than boot from disk, which may not work if its something with the hard drive that is preventing Windows from loading, how can I launch Windows XP?
Also can I restore to a previous restore point from the BIOS? Or is there some way to fix the hard drive failure error message we keep getting?
Thanks for any help!
