Help! My computer will not boot past the XP welcome screen. I called Dell Tech Support and they told me that I probably just need to reinstall the OS and that my data is probably gone. I am not going to believe that- I cannot believe that- there is very important information on the computer. I had been backing up to another drive on the computer- so I know that the info has to be there somewhere. When i go into set up, and go to boot sequence, the hard drives say (not installed) next to them. However, when I run the dell diagnostics, it tests the drives and says they are fine. SO... they are sending me the installation disks, but not sure if I trust dell tech support...
I recently moved, and when arriving to the new house this occurred. I am thinking the comp. got handled not so carefully in the move- i opened it up and looked inside and everything seemed to be attached... should I take the drives out and put them in another computer? what do i do?
Please reply.

Try starting up the existing HDD in safe mode. If that boots up fine, then you might have an issue with your OS. Check to see if you recently installed any new applications or drivers. This tends to cause the OS to fail like this sometimes.

If that does not resolve your issue, open up your machine and make sure that all of your cables are connected securly; you might as well give the insides a good dusting while you are in there. I've seen instances where dust build-up around connectors caused an issue.

If that doesn't work, then I would suggest putting another HDD into the machine to see if it will boot up with the new drive. If so, then make the new drive your primary HDD and the existing drive(s) your slave HDD(s): check your jumper settings for how to do this. Once you get this set up, you can boot into the newer of the HDDs and should be able to retrive any information from the old HDD (Windows Explorer should show the slave drive(s)).



This same scenario happened to me on my new VIAO, but it was due to a physical error on the surface of my HDD. Go figure, 2 months after my warrantee expires, my 200 GB HDD fails on me. Just pray that this isn't the same issue.

ok. i put another hdd in the machine and it hung at the welcome screen. I took out the hdd that i need, put it into another machine and tried to boot to it. I was given a blue screen with stop error code... 0x0006007B. not sure what it means... i don't know how to change jumper settings. all of these drives do not have actual jumpers like the olden days...so how can i make my drive the slave of the working computer???

The problem is that you can't just take a hard drive from one machine and put it into another under XP since the hardware is included into XP install. It will fail every time. The instructions were to make the hard disk a slave of one that was bootable.

The file system (rather than the physical data) may be damaged on the HD. Try this:

1) Boot the computer using a Windows XP setup disk. (It doesn't matter if it's Home or Pro or what Service Pack. A Win 2000 setup disk should also work.)

2) At the first screen where you can respond, hit R to enter the Recovery Console.

3) At the command prompt you will get, type the command CHKDSK /P

When CHKDSK is finished running (it may take a while), type EXIT and reboot from the HD. Windows just may start OK.

Lessee... you moved. Before the move, the computer was fine, now it isn't.

Have you tried pulling the RAM then reseating it? Have you tried pulling your vidcard and reseating it? Have you tried pulling every single connector from your PSU and re-connecting them?

My guess is that something shook loose during the move. If a known working HDD won't work in your system, it's probably not the HDD. Look for loose connections.