Hi Everyone … From a New Member.
Appreciate help on this. Have an Averatec 3700 Series. Has been working OK for about 20 months. Aside from the heat and slow boot process, it has been operating satisfactorily.
Last night it went from my working desktop with icons to just the wallpaper. I powered off and restarted. Upon re-boot, it takes me to the black safe mode DOS screen. The “start normally” choice just loops the reboot process again. “Last good configuration” starts the WinXP loading, but does not complete. Goes to black screen. Pressing a key brings up a blue screen with some words “registry” and “dump” that I can read. The screen is only on for a fraction of a second before it starts the re-boot process again. Would have to start the re-boot twenty or thirty times in order to catch it all. The Phoenix Technologies screen comes up with the request to get the license for “Recover Pro” each time on re-boot. (I never got the license and I just press enter to continue the boot.)
My other three choices for starting in Safe Mode do not work and bring up a DOS screen listing the drivers.
When I purchased the laptop, it was really out of the box and did not come with any software or recovery disks. Maybe a "Quick Start" sheet. I don't recall. I assumed this was the nature of the “low-cost” beast. However, it has served it’s purpose for use by my totally disabled wife which enabled her a contact with the outside world. It's very important that I am able to save her data!!! There was just the on-line manual which I believe I downloaded to HD or it was already in the Program directory. Since I am unable to acces the HD, it's useless.
Anyway, I have only Averatec Tech Support or friendly forums such as this to request some help in solving this. My primary concern is retaining the data on the HD. My wife passed away this past year and I would like to preserve the memories.
Contacted Averatec support and learned to use the F4 key to access Recover Pro. He almost had me doing a new install to factory settings. Luckily I asked if the data would be retained. He said... Nope! New install of the OS and installed programs from the factory.
Decided to use WinXP Upgrade disk to access the Recovery Console.
Problem - Using an Upgrade disk, in the Recovery Console, Administrator Password request.......
Forgot Password!!! Is there a work-around???
Thank you for anything you can suggest.
DonDE
P.S. - Startup error message is - Windows won't start Missing or corrupt file - \Windows\System\vgaoem.fon
Ran disk diag and results were:
Quick Test first and the results were 0x00
Advanced:
Drive - Toshiba MK8025GAS
Problem detected on a non-hitachi disk drive.
Contact your HDD supplier for additional support.
Disposition code = 0x72
