My computer is dead!! Help Please! (long)

So I installed the service pack for windows XP because I thought that it might help some of the problems I was having. It turned out that my computer started running extremely shitty. So I decided to uninstall the service pack. In the middle of the uninstallation, it froze trying to remove one file. I didn't know what to do, so I just resrtarted my computer. Here's where everuthing went wrong.

It booted up again, however, I get an error before it even gets to the logon screen in windows. It says that the ordinal 258 was not located in Shell32.dll. I click ok then it pops up another message saying my winlogon.exr is messed up along with the msgina.dll.

I decided to boot up using the XP CD and get to the recovery console. I copied over the shell32.dll and msgina.dll and got another winlogon.exe from another XP computer and copied that. I tried rebooting again however this time it would get into the logon, but a bluescreen would pop up with some weird message.

My quesiton is, Is there anyway I can just boot up and copy the files I need from my C drive to my other drive? THe c drive is formatted NTFS and my other one is FAT32. I tried copying files from the recovery console, but it said access is denied. I also tried booting to DOS using the DOS startup disk from XP. I got to a prompt bu it didn't see my C drive, I assume this is because it is NTFS. Is there anyway I can convert it to FAT32 so that dos can see it? I have Partition Magic, and i though about converting the disk to logical and seeing If i could convert it to FAT32, but i didn't want to screw anythign up.

I also tried connecting it to another computer as a slave drive, but that just caused the other computer to freeze.

I am desperate here. I need to get important files off tha drive. Any help would be greatly apprecieated. Sorry for the long rant. TIA

If the files aren't application files, or settings, why couldn't you simply reinstall XP? It's very doubtful there's something wrong with the disk, it's simply that XP is unbootable. If you're afraid that certain files will be wrecked in the install process there is another thing you could do first.

If you have access to another XP machine you could transplant your C drive, copy the files off of it and then proceed to reinstall your copy of XP (edit: sorry I missed that you'd tried this, but you didn't say if it was an XP machine or not, I seem to recall that the flavor of NTFS used on XP differs from that used on W2k). Chances are the files you copied will be waiting for you after the install, but if you're paranoid you could do this. Of course you will have to reinstall all you applications after the OS reinstall, which is a PITA but takes nothing more than time.

Whatever you do, do not format your C drive until those files are off of it! I've not got XP, but other versions of windows don't require a format before install.

Oh yeah, one other thing: Don't Panic.

(with thanks to Douglas Adams)

Good Luck!

-Zeke

I agree. You're right that the boot disk won't see NTFS files, so nothing unusual there, just frustrating. There are other boot disks available, things you'll find online, but my experience with them is that they don't work very well. Simple concept, but apparently hard to pull it off. Also, while I like Partition magic for many things, I wouldn't use it at this stage. My experience there (yours may be different but...) is that you will do more harm than good by converting it over and back again, or messing around with what drive is logocal, primary, blah blah.

There certainly should be a simple Windows reinstallation option. Boot from the CD, and start the normal installation process. When you get to the question about reformatting the drive, just move on and DO NOT reformat. Some questions will be thrown at you regarding there being an existing Windows operating system, that's OK. Go over top of it. This will repalce the Windows files that have become corrupted, but it will leave everything else alone.

That should get it back to where it was. Your start menu and other things may be rearranged, and little things like that, but your files will still be there.

This is what I would do anyways...

Still leaves an underlying question of why SP1 didn't go on. Was it a fluke, and would work if you tried again? Is it a symptom of a bigger problem?

If you can, persist with putting the dirve into another computer. An **extreme** solution may be to install GetDataBack onto the other computer and make sure it's running. Then boot from a floppy with your dud drive only and fdisk it, removing the partition. DON'T FORMAT IT AT THIS POINT.
Plug it in as the slave drive and reboot. Windows wont recognise it as anything until it has a partition. Use GetDataBack to rebuild the partition and extract the data.
I can vouch that GDB works great. I recovered 20+ gig off a disk with no partition.

you may be able to check the disk with GDB without removing the parition, but you mentioned that the other computer wouldn't start.