Hey guys, so I think I majorly screwed up my WinXP install on my IBM T61 laptop and am *hoping* (I think against all hope at this point) that I can at least recover the data on the HD, if not even fix the WinXP install. So here's what happened:
I had a normal working WinXP SP2 install on my laptop. I have a USB key from work with Win7 Enterprise on it, and apparently it's a bootable, SELF-INSTALLING image of Win7 (the bootable, self-installing part will become key in a second). My plan was to grab all my data off of the laptop and back it up and then install Win7 on it. The laptop is having issues where it loses internet access (which gets fixed on reboot) so w/o thinking about it, I rebooted it with the USB key still attached! *sigh* So of course the laptop boots up off the key (and I'm not paying attention right then) and Win7 starts the setup process (no prompts too; it just goes!!), and it's about 30 secs or so, and it gets to a point where it opens a cmd window and starts showing percentages and it gets to 1% and then I close the cmd window by hitting the X in the top right corner and that restarts my computer. It said it was doing some stuff before that and maybe I should've stopped it a little sooner but I was afraid I'd screw things up if I stopped it in the middle of redo'ing partitions or something, but once I saw the percentages I figured I'd better stop it sooner rather than later. In any case it rebooted and came up with "windload.exe is missing". That's when I started troubleshooting. So here's what I did: 1) Put in my IBM rescue and recovery CD (which took a while to load; I don't think it was doing anything to my install, though it's possible, but seems unlikely) and looked at the options but decided nothing there would help me. 2) So then I found and put in my WinXP CD and got to its blue screen, and started the recovery console. I read some stuff so I did "fixboot" and restarted. 3) Then I got the "ntldr is missing" message. So reading some more I copied ntldr and ntdetect.com from the winXP CD to c:\ using the recovery console and restarted. 4) THEN I got the "hal.dll is missing or corrupt" error message this time! Read even more and I tried to expand the file from the recovery console but got an error (which is weird)! No idea why that happened and that's when I paused and decided to take stock and ask for help and not make things worse. At this point, I went back to the recovery console and looked at my HD and that's when I got the sinking feeling... I don't see a lot of the dirs I expect in WinXP, and all the dirs have a date of 01/02/10, and there's no Doc Settings dir, but a Users dir, but my username isn't there and it looks like somehow Win7 wiped the disk and started the install in like 30 secs or something!! How did it do that?! I also noticed the dirs are there, but no files in any of the dirs, which looks like an aborted install of Win7. So at this point, is there any way to recover my data? Do I need to send my HD to Tim or can I use a program to recover stuff (assuming it's not overwritten)? I'm hoping that I can get the data but give it to me straight; if I'm screwed, then let me know so I can stop wasting my time trying to recover it, and just write the data off as lost and move on. Thanks so much for any help guys, and Happy New Year!! BINO
