Dead Computer? Possibly...

[madeperfect]

So, today I tried to log onto my HP computer. Lo and behold, my internet was down. We're on a Wireless network in our house, and so I figured the net might be down. So, I reset the router. BUT, then I realized that the other computers in the house still worked. So, I decide to do a system restore. However, the computer was running incredibly slow and sluggish, and so I had to punch the button. I then decided okay, I shall go into safe mode and try to run the system restore from there. I bring push F8, and try to load the safe mode. However, when I hit enter, it actsl ike its going to start, but then just reboots, and goes (without me even pushing F8!) into the screen where you select. I can't select ANY of the options on the screen, it just reboots again.

I emailed HP, and they just said to do a non-destructive system recovery. However, that scares me. I have irresplacable files on that computer...and the computer doesn't have a burner, and I have'nt been able to back most of them up yet. I have pictures on there going back to my 8th grade year in high school, going all the way up to now (I'm a senior). My pictures mean the world to me.

This was my mom's old computer at school, and it's been around since my freshman year. It has been non-desctruviely restored twce, and destructively restored once. I'm just scared of something going screwy and losing everything.

Is there anything else, at all, I can do? Thanks!

 

[Quantos]

If your truly worried about loosing data, go with the following

1) Go Buy a New Harddrive
2) Set the New Drive as Master, your Old one as Slave.
3) Install New Hard Drive But Leave your Original OUT of the system
4) Do A Full Recovery of your system with the recovery CDs / DVDs
This should give you a fully operating system
5) Shut down & Install the old HD as a secondary HD

You should now have a fully restored system, and all your data is safe on the second HD, just find it, and copy it to the New HD.

 

[simplicity]

It's hard to believe you have a wireless network in your house but not a computer to let you burn CDs. If you ever do recover from this problem, buy an external CD drive so you can start archiving your files.

The first logical move would be to backup the irreplaceable files onto whatever medium is accessible to you. If the medium is inaccessible, then your file cannot be backed up. If you can backup the files, the next step would be to backup any additional files you might have difficulty replacing. Then you should attempt a non-destructive system recovery. If this process actually destroys files, the files would by definition become non-recoverable. If you can upload files to some kind of transfer server, that would be a sensible approach.

There are also exotic approaches like having somebody put your drive into another computer with a free bay and then transferring files from your drive onto theirs. I've never tried this although I guess it might work. Alternatively, the host computer might feel your drive needs to be formatted, which of course would destroy all the data. So there are risks to everything.

 

[simplicity]

Oops, Quantos beat me to the post. But his suggestion sounds pretty good to me.