One day, my friends pc just reset itself for no reason. Ok, no worries. Gradually over the course of a week, it kept doing it more and more, shorter time after boot up each time. Eventually this has got to the point where windows (xp home) begins to load then whilst the loading screen is on, it just freezes. If it ever asks him what to do (ie. boot windows normally) selecting boot windows normally simply resets the machine. It also freezes when attempting to start in safe mode. I thought this could be either a) corrupt boot sector/system file b) some nasty virus c) damaged/dieing hard drive However, as we dont know which it is for certain, we are unsure as to what he should do. The data on the hard drive is important and he does not have another drive that he could boot to. Any ideas anyone?
try to do a repair console from the install cd? see if it boots to a knoppix cd? that would rule out hardware problems at least, and might allow for some backing up of those files ...
he doesnt have an install cd ... yea i know hehe but its his pc not mine. knoppix is a good idea though, i think thats definately worth a try.
