If you have the usual PC with DVD and a CDRW, get this CD and you can backup.
Bob
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Dell 4400, XP home, 128 RAM
I used my pc one morning. Four hours later, when the system came up, I received the "invalid boot.ini," then the missing hal.dll message.
Dell tech tried to work with me. I can get to the Recovery Module, but every single password I've tried doesn't work. Dell says that the only option is a reinstall of XP.
That would be OK, if my data had beed backed up. I have too much info that I do not want to lose.
The following solutions have been proposed. I would like to know the pro's and con's of each.
1) buy another internal hard drive and copy the current drive to it. I assume I would make the new drive the master.
2) buy an external hard drive and transfer the info there. But I don't know if this would really work. Maxtor says that you can't boot Windows from an external drive--but you can Mac.
3) Overlay XP Pro over XP and repair boot.ini.
Is there another solution, beside the Dell one of reinstalling everything from scratch?
Discussion is locked