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Back to Square One

Just when I thought everything’s fine with my PC, it broke down again after only two days of using it. I don’t know what went wrong. I shut down the PC that night, and on the next day when I used it, it’s not working normally again. The PC is booting up, it goes through the Windows XP start-up process where you have to choose between the safe mode, last known good configuration and start windows normally. But I couldn’t even select a thing, the keyboard was useless. After the Windows XP logo, the blue screen appeared but I couldn’t read it since it restarted so quickly. Restart, then Windows logo, blue screen and restart again.

I decided to boot using the Windows XP CD and used the Recovery Console. I thought I was able to ‘repair’ it since this happened to me a couple of times already…I was a little confident it will be okay and everything will be recovered.

After few minutes, I sensed that something’s wrong… and it’s beyond my comprehension. I couldn’t access the Drive C where Windows XP is installed. It looks like an empty drive. When I type dir it says “an error occurred during directory enumeration”. When I tried the bootcfg /scan it says “Failed to successfully scan disk for windows installations. Error may be caused by a corrupt file system.” I tried to check the drive using chkdsk but it says “The volume appears to contain 1 or more unrecoverable problem”

I wanted to reformat and have a fresh install of XP right there and then but I have a new WordPress template I created that night before the ‘collapse’ and some unbacked-up files that I wanted to retrieve.

I googled for some possible workarounds but I couldn’t find the exact solution where I could keep my important files intact.

I asked for cousin-in-law’s help again, thinking he might have the solution I was looking for. But I was not expecting too much. I even told myself that even if the important files won’t be recovered (how sad 🙁 ), what matters to me now is that the PC will still be usable.

Just two days ago, he texted me and said that the PC is already fixed and that he sent it to their house for me to pick up. So my younger sister Gina, Sean and I went there to pick up the PC.

It’s working normally now, except that I lost all the files in Drive C. Luckily I have some back-up copies in Drive D, but those were not updated. Well, it’s much better than nothing, much better than being back to square one.

2 thoughts on “Back to Square One

  1. I have the same problem …
    And I can’t fix …
    I shutdown the PC in the afternoon …
    And I turn on the PC in the next morning ….
    It show error loading operating system ….
    When I try to fix it with repair from the installer cd…
    it show :
    an error occurred during directory enumeration (for dir)
    the volume contain unrecoverable problem (for chkdsk)
    And i have bring it to the tehnician hardware , they say the hardware is ok ….
    I think it’s caused by automatic windows update …

  2. In my case, am sure it’s not the automatic windows update since I turned it off. Until now I don’t know what have caused the problem.

    O wait, I just remember that I used a windows registry cleaner and then defragged the drive C two days before, and I was able to use my PC without trouble the next day. But when I opened it on the second day after defrag….it’s not working properly! I don’t know why!!???

    Well, anyway, at least I learned something from the experience… and that is to make sure you have a (latest) back-up copy of important files… because you’ll never know what will happen next.