Non Booting PC

Greetings,

I'm having issues with my PC at work. It locked up on me during a shutdown, and after about 10 minutes I manually shut it down( It was sitting on a blue screen with a mouse pointer displayed, with no indication of anything happening, ie. drive lights off, no sounds etc...).

Since then it will not boot into windows ( XP Pro ), not even in safe mode. The message indicating that windows was not shut down correctly does come up, along with the options to go safemode etc..., but all of those option start, running and then reboot.

We have some utils. that gave us conflicting results. One said that the drive was unformated, another recognized the NTFS partition but could not find and MFT.

So I was wondering if any one knew of any GOOD utils to diagnose this, preferably inexpensive.

Thanks

Probably the easiest thing to do would be to put your Windows installation disc in, and then turn the computer on. You'll go through a couple of menus - you're looking for one that says "Repair a Windows Installation." You need to do that. DON'T FORMAT YET. If the Repair thing doesn't work, you'll want to take the drive out and get what stuff you need off of it before formatting.

We tried that already. The problem is that we cannot read the HD, so taking off important files at this point cannot happen. Anytime you type DIR at a DOS prompt and it gives you an error, I start to suspect bad things. Using a floppy boot disk with all the normal dos utils, we were not able to fire up DIR, FDISK etc.

The tech guy is trying some utility that claims to rebuild the MFT by scanning the HD, but so far nothing much seems to be happening, either that or it is a VERY long process.

Just looking to see if anyone has had any experience with this type of low-level HD data repair/retrieval, and if so what did they use.

Thanks

A DOS-boot disk will do you no good unless it has a special way of reading NTFS.
I would try booting a KNOPPIX-LIVE-CD. This is a linux with NTFS drivers onboard. It comes with many tools, perhaps you can use it to repair your hard disk. Most probably it is only some missing files...

Greetings
Firzair