Calling all tech wizzes!

[Subb]

Major alert here.

My OS has broken and I cannot boot up on to normal or safe mode. I need to get work off my laptop (RESEARCH PROJECT) and taking out the HDD is out of the question (don't want to break the warranty). Every time I boot up it goes to startup recovery and then fails. The diagnosis says, after a shit load of gibberish, that a corrupt registry is to blame. I can't really see that being the case since I clean up with CCleaner every other day to get rid of various crap.

Alienware (fuckin' shock horror) told me to do the aforementioned task, so I replied with a curtious 'fuck you'. In turn, the guy said that a technician can do the data recovery, but it'll cost me.

Any of you guys have anything to add?

Muchos appreciated.

[Lithium]

Yeah, put in the OS disk and run a Repair.

[Subb]

Would that work and keep my files? System restore just fails. Left my optical drive back in uni.

[Ash]

Make sure you only do a "Repair" and it should leave your data files intact.

[Lithium]

Make sure you only do a "Repair" and it should leave your data files intact.

This is correct.

[Fuse]

Do the repair. If that doesn't work, try fixboot if you can get into cmd. I'm suspecting you don't have backups of your registry, otherwise I'd suggest you load that in cmd. If you have another drive try to boot to that one. I've used USB/IDE external drive before for shit like this.

[Lithium]

And just to rant, because I can. I don't understand why people will spend hundreds if not thousands on computers but they won't spend $30 for Acronis to back their stuff up!

[Subb]

Lithium - I know, I know. I periodically email my work to myself. But I've updated it all and added thousands of words to it. I'm just hoping that Dropbox still has my over 70,000 words WIP. Will definately do a proper backup from now on, though.

Will go back to Uni this weekend (hopefully) and run a repair. Cheers.

[Eroz]

BTW, I don't know of a single computer that would break warranty on pulling out a hard drive. If its a laptop it should just be a single screw panel that allow access to the hard drive, if its a desktop, you should just need to open the case, and Dell stopped putting security stickers on everything, so they would have no way of knowing if anything has been opened before or not.

[Paitryn]

BTW, I don't know of a single computer that would break warranty on pulling out a hard drive. If its a laptop it should just be a single screw panel that allow access to the hard drive, if its a desktop, you should just need to open the case, and Dell stopped putting security stickers on everything, so they would have no way of knowing if anything has been opened before or not.

most commercial warranties are broken the moment you open the case. they generally have a seal somewhere to check by.

the postitive however, coming from being a former gateway tech, is that largely if a customer complains enough they get service anyways no big deal. though half the time we had customers crack the case on the pc itself to do tech by phone, though never for laptops.