BleepingComputer.com: Please Say It Isn't So.

Greetings everyone, I know that I rarely come here, but today you`ll get the chance to suffer me once more

I`ve tried and tested the assistance given through this forum and can personally attest of the competence and diligence of all those brilliant techies that save us, commoners, from destroying our machines with our ceaseless ignorance. If it weren't for you, I am sure the lot of us would be prone to recur to the Neanderthal way of "fixing"... tamper with everything, press, pull, disconnect, reconnect, not knowing that we could screw things more than they are, and in the end if all else fails we resort to our final solution... throwing whole computers out of the window hoping that the 'bonk' of the fall will do the job, rather than render the PC into a sea of shattered silicon and plastic.

So, please bear with me.


You see, my computer isn't working. I dire the possibility that my system may have crashed, because every single time that I restart/turn on the computer it boots, but as soon as the Windows ME start up screen loads, the computer shuts down. I even get the "Shutting down computer" thing. I tried accessing the machine through Safe Mode but it isn't that much of an improvement: I just get to glimpse the desktop wallpaper without anything else loading... and then it shuts down.

Before the problem happened, I was browsing the web on Firefox, specifically this site> http://www.esmitierra.com.sv/. Then Firefox froze, task manager didn't respond, so I manually restarted the machine only to have it turn off instead... And it has been turning off ever since.

So, what could of happened? Please tell me my system didn't crash and that I lost all of my files... Well, not exactly, because I was in the process of making a back up of most of them (5GB done and about 2 to go... all of them images, videos, etc. leisurely stuff), but I can't simply let the rest be unanswered for. I HAVE TO find a way to make this PC to work, because much of my data is very difficult to recover, because it is old.

So tell me, what could have been the problem? Could placing the problematic hard disk as a slave on a secondary machine let me access it and try to fix it or at least recover the data?


Thank you, and I'll be grateful for your help!


I really, really, really hope it wasn't a total loss of data system crash, for the sake of the PC, because I do feel the caveman in me firing up....

This post has been edited by Nema: 03 October 2008 - 06:55 PM

Quote

Yes, that's one of the ways to do it

I'll defer to others what attempts to try on you r computer. I've never used ME

Ofcourse you can put the hard disk as secondary on some other computer and access it.

You can try booting the computer into Safe mode to exclude any problematic drivers. Sometimes, lack of blank space on hard disk also causes problems.

Oddly, this sounds remarkably similar to an event I too suffered recently although I was not on the net at the time but testing out the comp after a '5000 miles service '

My comp seemed to start, then just shut itself off for no apparent reason

Then refused to boot up and even shut itelf down ; no matter how we tried it refused to be allowed to turn on; puzzled , we listened..and listened.....

the fan had stopped working and the comp WAS protecting itself from overheating


once fan was sorted we were back in business again much to my relief;
Is a fan failure your solution too maybe?