Windows won't boot up fully/at all

[Jason beck_1]

Sys Info:
HP Pavilion 7935
Windows Xp
AMD 1.3 GHz Athlon
384MB of Ram
40gb

From the begining: I was playing Blasterball Wild, a Wild Tangent game, and listening to music with Musicmatch Jukebox. I clicked 3dsound option either to turn off the sound of the game or to see if there was a difference between 3dsound or regular plain old sound. And that's when my computer just turned off and restarted.

The screen came up and with "no OS found." so then i restarted the computer to check if the drive was recognized in the bios, it wasn't (i don't know if i made any changes). what else could i do i thought, so i restarted it(a few times maybe) and checked the bios again and there was my drive recognized, I thought 'cool' and continued with the startup.

A blue error screen came up that mentioned something about corrupt data. I might have had the option to delete the corrupt data or start the computer normally. I must've chosen to delete the corrupt data, so it began it's process of deleting corrupt segments (i'm pretty sure it was segments). After a restart i think the corrupt data screen came up again, and again data got deleted, if so, then it rebooted.

So what shows is the: safe mode(s) (shows the process of loading files from multi-disk(partition)
last known configuration
and start windows normally
screen; I try all, as well as the ones from pressing F8 at startup, but what happens is Windows XP and the green scrolling bar will show up after choosing Last Known or Normal. Then I get another error message that shows up for about less than half a second. I was able to piece the message together:

A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.

If this is the first time you've seen this step/stop error screen restart your computer. If this screen appears again follow these steps:

Disable or uninstall any antivirus, disk defragentation or backup utilities.
Check your hard drive configuration, and check for any updated drivers.
Use CHKDSK IF to fcheck for drive corruption and then restart your computer.

Technical Information:
***Stop:0x00000024 (0x00190IFF, 0x82b67828, 0xc0000102, 0x0000000)

And that's where i'm stuck. Little help...please

The "accessing hard-drive" light does come on and I can hear normal hard-drive sounds and no abnormal ones.

I don't have an XP boot-disk but I should be able to get one, if I need it.
I have no backups or recovery disks, but there is a hidden HP partition that has the recovery data on it (pressing F10 will open it.
Supposedly I have the option to do a non-destructive recovery with the HP recovery but it's supposed to give me the option on the first "progress icon" (like when installing windows there are icons that show the steps like the icons for the completed steps are faded or transparent), but it starts on the second icon, and so i don't continue with the HP recovery.

I really really want to save all my data but i'm willing to cut my loses(data wise) and recover as much as I can, hopefully you guys and girls can help me out.
I was thinking that maybe I could delete the master boot record and get a copy of xp from someone then install it on another hard-drive, access my data, burn everything to cdr's, then do a destructive recovery on the first hard-drive. Would that be possible? Is there a better way?

I hadn't defragmented in a long time and I was running out of space after so much downloading. I had about less than 500Megs one time it got down to less than 100megs i think.

[Ross Judd]

In order to run a games like WildTangent has, you must have sufficient space in your "swapfile" which obviously you did not have. ergo, it tried to write data to the parts of the drive that were free, That is the spaces between all of your fragmented files. Very easy to corrupt data that way.
Probably corrupted your bootsector too. You also don't have enough space to do a system recovery. You don't even have enough space to defrag! Get a XP boot disk and go to the repair console, Try to recover your boot sector. Boot in safe mode, and get rid of some of that bloat! Oh, and get rid of that nasty wild tangent,it's SPYWARE!

[ranthony2cfl.rr.com]

You CAN save or recover most of your files -- they have not all been corrupted, yet.
My preferred way to do this is to temporarily put in another drive (does not have to be very big; even 500MB is usually enough), or to assign unallocated space on your current drive to a new partition. Then install another operating system on that new drive or partition: You could use another PC to download a small LINUX onto CD, and then install it on the problem PC, or install another version of Windows.
!NOTE!> DO NOT FORMAT THE DRIVE for this installation.
If you would rather stay with Windows, then I recommend you install 2000 from CD -- it gives you the option to format the drive, or put a partition on it and install to that partition. Whether you install to a new small drive or a partition, you should also install there a CD driver or network support, so you can move the data files you will recover onto CD or another machine on your home network. The new system on that same machine will give you the ability to access the files already on that machine. Then, access your data files from the newly installed system and put them to CD or the other networked machine.
When you are done saving data files, put the 2000 CD in again, and delete the partition you just created. Then format the drive. Then reinstall your desired opsys and applications. Then Ghost an image of what you have there, and burn it. Then move your recovered data-files back from CD or the networked machine onto this machine.
Since you have had running-out-of-space alerts I think you should put in a small drive instead of trying to partition. From your help-request it seems you are not without some prior experience, so you almost certainly have a small 2 or 3 Gig drive laying around from a previous sytem. Here is a chance to use it to recover some critical stuff. Then you may decide to keep it an maintain a Ghosted (and compressed) image on it of your main drive.

[Thomas Bianco · Accepted solution]

Stop 0x24 is a generic NTFS file system error.

Ranthony's plan will work (very well, in fact). There is a simpler way, but it requires a good friend, and a few screwdrivers.

First, rip the casing off your PC and remove your hard drive. Carry it to your aforementioned buddy's house, and install it into his machine in place of the CD-Rom. boot his XP system, it should automatically check the disk for errors (if not, run "chkdsk d: /f" from a command prompt).

Repeat until you get no errors, they copy all the stuff you want to keep onto your friends c:. Format the disk and copy it all back, they unplug it from your friends PC and take it home and load XP fresh (be sure you don't let setup format the disk).

As I said, it takes a GOOD friend to let you install strange stuff into his PC, let alone dominate it for a few hours.

[Jason beck_1]

I bought an 80gig hard drive and was thinking of installing it in my friends and also installing the drive that went south but I thought that having both drives (his XP and my XP) would result in both OS's trying to boot-up, causing a conflict of some sort. Would it? And would I be keeping my drive as the master if I did replace his cd or dvd drive or would I have to make it the slave?

But his current configuration is:
C: a hard drive
d: a hard drive
e: a cdrw drive/or a dvd rom
F: a Dvd drive/or a cdrw drive

I was thinking, if there would be no conflicts with the double XP thing then I could do checkdisk thing until I got no errors then copy all my files to my new hard drive like you mentioned, but with this configuration.

c: my friends hard drive
d: my non-booting drive
e: my new drive
F: his cdrw

I'm going to buy norton ghost. And so what I really want to do is manually copy simple data files(mp3, docs, mpg, animation files,and stuff I've downloaded ) to his C: Then, if I can, just use norton Ghost to copy my os and its files and settings.

Which do you think is my best option?

[Kim Torkelson]

Jason, your configuration idea looks good. Your non-booting drive would be jumpered as a slave on the Primary IDE controller, and the new HD would be the master on the Secondary IDE controller. Should work like you hope, with no conflict of OS. Just make sure your friend's HD is jumpered Master.
good luck
~kim

[Mikael Rundqvist]

Hi,
you've problably already solved your problem but an advice would be to download knoppix. It's a linux boot from CD-system with lots of applications including Samba wich anbles you to access files on a drive which does not boot and make it poosible to fetch the files via a lan by starting the samba server in knoppixand the connect to the machine from another windows system as a shared drive.
/best regards Mikael