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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

I want to document this problem both for myself, and for anyone else that might find themselves in the same situation.

A Dell machine that I depend on would occasionally "freeze up" and not respond to alt ctrl dwn, in order to kill tasks, or shut down.

This happend to me several dozen times over the past year.

What I would do is unplug the machine and then plug it in again.

It always seemed to work find.

But today, the same thing happend, and when I unplugged and then turned it back on, it could not boot up, nor would F8 and SAFE mode, or any of the other options in F8 help. The machine would say that it could not load the myriad of device drivers necessary, and then return to that same warning screen.

I had my recovery CD which came with the machine. I called Dell support, and wound up talking with a support technician in India, who was very helpful, by the way. It just boggles my mind to be in USA and have a support call go to India.

Anyway, he told me to hold down F12 while the machine powered up, and with the recovery CD in the CD drive. I tried a couple of times, and no luck. But on the fifth try, holding down F12, the screen suddenly asked me where I want to boot from. I chose to boot from CD. It now SUCCESSFULLY loaded all those missing drivers. Then it offered me the choice of installing Windows from scratch, or Recovery option. I chose R for recovery and it placed me at a DOS type C:> prompt. The repair technician instructed me to key in CHKDSK /R

The machine ran for about an hour, doing CHKDSK. At the end, it left me once again at the C:> prompt. I typed in EXIT and it began to reboot. I simultaneously opened the CD to remove the Restore Disk, per his instructions.

Windows again offered me the SAFE MODE versus normal boot. I chose normal, and it booted normally. All my files were intact. No data was lost.

My desktop does have a tape drive which is supposedly able to back up my machine, and several other machines on the local P2P network. I had experienced problems in the past backing up the remote machines across the network. The tape drive software explains that backup for DISASTER recovery is only possible with the local desktop on which the tape drive is installed.

I discovered that there is an option in the tape drive software to create recovery diskettes and/or a recovery CD, to be used for disaster recovery.

I am doing a full tape backup of my desktop right now. When it is done. I chall attept to create a disaster recovery boot cd, as well as boot floppies.

I had been making periodic backups to cd of key folders. But in the event of a disaster, such a backup will not restore the registry or all the programs.

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