TSGL: TSGL Compaq wont boot

[Don Penlington]

Ron wrote:
>I still have around 8000 files named File0001.chk and counts to the
>File7995.chk which are recovered file fragments files.
>
>Soooo, unless someone has a magic wand I will call this a lesson learned and
>move on to do a reformat and reinstall the system.>>


My guess is that the W98 scandisk is set to read a FAT32 system, whereas XP 
is normally (but not necessarily) placed on a NTFS system.  To any W98 
utility, the NTFS files look like a jumble and scandisk has therefore tried 
to "rescue" them. With luck, this might only be a renaming, and it's 
possible that they may in fact still be intact, though of course you can't 
see them with any dos-reading utility. Dos cannot read NTFS without 
specialised (read expensive) software.

See if you can download, or beg borrow or steal, a copy of the "BartCE 
emergency startup disk".  This is an emergency CD designed to read XP in 
situations like yours.  It loads a cutdown version of XP straight off its 
own disk, so that it is not in any way dependant on your installed 
version.  The disk also has a rudimentary file management utility by which 
you can read, execute, move and copy files to another partition or an 
external source. You can even run System Restore off it, as long as your 
installed version of XP isn't too hosed.

It should do what you want, provided your NTFS files have not been too 
corrupted.

You will, of course, have to download and then burn the BartCE disk 
yourself, unless you happen to have one or can obtain one.  I believe 
ready-made ones come up on Ebay occasionally.  It is not difficult to make 
one---you download the files and then follow the instructions to burn a 
boot disk. Just google for BartCE.

I believe there are special utilities which will try to re-combine CHK 
files where possible once you have saved them, but I'm not familiar with 
these. You could try

  CHK-Mate:
http://www.majorgeeks.com/CHK-Mate_d4110.html  or

Flobo CHK-Identifier (there might be a trial version):
http://www.floborecoverysoft.com/

Don Penlington




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