Well, my old office machine just crashed, I can still access the hard drive, but when I try to boot into Windows 2000, it gets to a blue screen (just before you enter your user name and password) and just hangs there. I can not even get into Safe mode to restore to a previous day. I did run Chkdsk and it found a couple of bad files and truncated them, now I can't log in. And, I don't have my Win 2k Disks anymore. Anyone have any ideas on how I can get it back up and working? Or would it be beneficial for me to just go buy XP Pro upgrade? Would that save my desktop and apps? Thanks, DD
If you had the 2000 disk, you could run a repair. But you don't so... There's no guarantee that trying to run a XP upgrade will do the trick, but it's worth a try. Worse case scenario, it doesn't work, but you have XP to do a clean install. Good luck!
ah the dreaded blue-out. You're pretty much up ****s creek by now. its a pretty common thing, so google can probably help you out.
If I get a Win 2k disk I should be able to sort it out, would the floppy bootables help? Link to bootables I can get to the drive in Dos and cruise around, all the data is still there.....and accessible...but I just can't get into Windows in any form whatsoever. or maybe the rescue/repair feature on Win2k disks, if I can find some DD
DD- If you do get 2k disks, boot to the disk and skip the first repair. That just runs recovery console. If you skip recovery console and tell it to set up windows, Setup will scan for previous versions. When it finds yours, it will ask you again if you want to repair, and it will run an automated repair that looks just like an upgrade. I do this all the time. It straightens out DLLs and installs default drivers. Works 90% of the time for me.
Just the install disk and the serial. Its really straightforward, just follow my instructions- like I said, it's just like running an upgrade, but you're not really upgrading. Good luck- I'll check back tomorrow and see if you have any other questions.
I had the EXACT same problem as DaDakota about a week ago. Blue screen before login and no win2k disc. Anyway, I got a copy of windows (same build and everything) and ran a repair install. Put in the serial, and everything looks beautiful...my login screen is back! But I can't login without Activation from Microsoft. I was able to get around this, but only by doing a fresh install of windows. Luckily when I first installed I put the OS on a partition separate from all my personal data and programs. So I didn't lose anything important; I just had to spend hours setting things back up. Firefox add-ons, bookmarks (were lost), mailboxes, programs back into the start menu etc.
I took the drive out and hooked it up as a slave....my IT manager reminded me that this was my original machine and I had a much more powerful one in storage. So....I am getting the data....and gonna reformat that machine. DD
Got the data, and am now running a 3.5 ghz machine instead of that old 1.7...wow...much better. I never found the Win2k Disks but I saved the drive in case there is any more info I need from it. Thanks for the help... DD
