I have a P4 running on win XP pro. As of yesterday, it has decided not to boot. It won't go past the windows "welcome" screen. Tried to boot in safe mode (F8) and thru optical drive to no avail. It hangs on both instances.

The HDD has not been partitioned, and I would have wanted to copy some data before reformatting it. Is there any way I could retrieve the data from C: if I connect the HDD to another PC thru an external enclosure?

Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

How much data you got to recover? Anyway, if you want to pull the HDD and take it to Pantip (BKK or CNX) or your local equivalent, most repair shops can hook it up via USB as second/slave drive and read the drive, if it's not dusted. You can move your data and reformat the drive, reload the OS. This is sort of the nuts and bolts way of doing it, but I've done it this way before when all other tweaking options have failed.

if you have (acces to) another pc, hook up your hdd as a slave drive to that other pc. if it's a booting issue, then this way you can easily retrieve your data and even reformat this way.

I had a similar prob a few years ago/.

Took it to my buddies house, he removed my laptop's hdd, put it on one of his pc's as a slave, copied my (data) files to my own external back up drive, then reinserted my hdd, and reformatted.

an hours work, less even.

if it's just the boot that is the problem.

tried booting from the CD to reformat but it still hangs leaving a blank dark screen. is this HDD officially knackered? or could it be a CPU prob?

I have a P4 running on win XP pro. As of yesterday, it has decided not to boot. It won't go past the windows "welcome" screen. Tried to boot in safe mode (F8) and thru optical drive to no avail. It hangs on both instances.

The HDD has not been partitioned, and I would have wanted to copy some data before reformatting it. Is there any way I could retrieve the data from C: if I connect the HDD to another PC thru an external enclosure?

Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

When booting into safe mode, at which stage does the system hang? Is it after drivers have been loaded and the registry has been processed? What is the very final thing to appear on the screen before the hang?

When booting into safe mode, at which stage does the system hang? Is it after drivers have been loaded and the registry has been processed? What is the very final thing to appear on the screen before the hang?

It hangs as the drivers are being loaded. It is unable to complete loading the drivers because it hangs.

If booting in normal mode, it hangs during the "welcome" screen.

When booting into safe mode, at which stage does the system hang? Is it after drivers have been loaded and the registry has been processed? What is the very final thing to appear on the screen before the hang?

It hangs as the drivers are being loaded. It is unable to complete loading the drivers because it hangs.

If booting in normal mode, it hangs during the "welcome" screen.

What is the last line of text to appear on the screen before the hang? Any ideas?

Have you tried booting with Windows Ultimate Boot Cd? If you don't have it now, maybe someone has a copy you can use.

What is the last line of text to appear on the screen before the hang?

Unfortunately, the PC won't boot any more. I can still hear the fans running, but nothing else on the monitor. What else is there to do?