HELP-BLue Screen of Death. now can't boot

[tmy23]

Greetings and Happy New Years..

My daughter has a dell Inspiron laptop that went Blue Screen of Death to boot failure. She told me it's ok to wipe it, but I know she has a lot of pictures on it and I'd like to try to recover them for her before wiping it. The HD seems affected. I have no way to prove viral corruption, but I know she has been running w/o virus protection and surfs lots of media sites, so I wouldn't be surprised if some nasty is involved. The laptop is over 4 years old. Here are the symptoms and what I've tried to far.

1. Trying a normal boot hangs the system before the any windows screen at the "black screen". The PC has a chronic "battery Calibration" message" which she typically bypasses with ESC, but I've recently had her run the calibration through to completion and it still pops the calibration message On bootup once you ESC past that message, there is no further drive activity (based on sound and the HD light), and it sits at black screen.

2. I booted and then hit F12. Took me to dell diagnostics. I ran individual diagnostics on Memory, bios, HD, and "control system" all passed, even the HD diagnostic. There are "symptom based" diagnostics and I selected "can't boot OS", this ran over an hour through a number of memory and HD tests, no errors reported.

3. I then tried to boot into safe mode so that I could dump her photos to a memory stick and then wipe it, but the system gets through about 20 of the lines in the DOS bootup list and hangs, consistently at the same place and will not complete the DOS boot to windows.

4. I created a XP boot CD on another XP computer and booted using this, which correctly takes me to A:, but it will not let me access C:, with an "invalid drive specification" message. (question, is there a way to boot windows, not DOS, from a CD?)

5. I loaded using a Windows XP CD, and took it through the setup until the decision to wipe the drive, or not, but it said that "my documents" might be wiped and that's where the photos are, so I escaped.

6. Using the XP Cd I ran windows recovery console (R) and ran CHKDSK which ran to completion and then ran bootfix, which returned with no error messages.

As you experts can see, I know enough to be dangerous, but I'm out of tricks, except for the thought to remove the HD and try to load it as a slave inside desktop system, just to get the files off it..

I would sincerely appeciate any help that can be provided. thanks very much!!!

[Spools]

What are the error codes on the blue screens?
Try taking out the battery and running only on AC to see if you can get past the calibration message.

[glc]

Remove the hard drive and use a USB adapter to get the files off onto another computer.

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=2020&cat=HDD

Then put it back in and press Ctrl+F11 immediately on startup. This will start Symantec PC Restore, which will reimage the hard drive back to the way it came out of the factory. DO NOT TRY TO DO ANY KIND OF REINSTALL with a XP CD unless the recovery partition has been wiped, and then use ONLY a Dell-branded reinstallation CD along with the Dell Resource CD that came with the laptop. If you have neither, you are going to have to BUY a new copy of XP and download all the drivers from Dell. The product key on the sticker will NOT work with a generic copy of XP but Dell CD's install with no key required.

[tmy23]

I'll try these options and then get back to you.

thanks!