Inspiron 1420=Don't Start Up. what happened?

Hi guys, help here please. my dell inspiron 1420 dont start up. when i open my laptop, there are 2 options, first one is to StartUp Repair and the 2nd one is to Normally start. When i choose to start normally, the screen becomes black and nothing happens. when i tried repairing it there's a screen message with [Startup Repair, You computer was unable to start, startup repair will fix them automatically..... then somethings loading, "attempting repairs...." but after few minutes, the loading stops and nothing happened. i think it freezes. so what's the problem? my friend told me that maybe my OS was corrupted and maybe i can just reformat it but i had many important files saved in drive C. so what can i do to recover it or backup it? HELP PLEASE. THANKS!

 

Sounds like you just need to take the drive out, buy a 2.5" enclosure(25 bucks), and take the files off of the drive. Then reformat the drive.

 

ahaha, that's what im planning to do men... thanks anyway.^^

 

If you press F8 before windows loads those options, you should get more options. If you disable the "Automatic Restart" option you should then see a blue screen instead of it rebooting. Post the blue screen error code (Ex: 0x00000024) and maybe we can help better. But most likely it is a bad HDD or corrupt file system. You could try testing the HDD with a tool like SeaTools from Seagate or Drive Fitness Test from Hitachi. Both can test other brands and should tell you if the drive is bad. If it isn't then you could go into Windows Recovery Console which is on your install disc and run "CHKDSK C: /P /R". Replace "C:" with every drive partition you have until it has checked everyone. If CHKDSK helps you might want to give MemTest86+ a few passes to make sure the file system didn't become corrupt from memory issues. Also make sure you have at least 10%-15% free space left on your drive. Hope that helps.

 

Good advice MrTriX.

xander7, take this as a lesson to learn the importance of backing up your files on a regular basis. Hopefully you can recover them, but in the future keep them backed up so you don't have to worry.

 

thanks guys for the replies but my problem is already solved. first i remove my HDD and put it in a enclosure, then transfer my files to another pc and return the HDD on my laptop and reformat. DONE! thanks! yup, i learned a lesson, back up back up back up! weeeeeeeeee.

 

If that worked then you probably had file system corruption. You might want to test the HDD and MEM anyway just to make sure they are not the reason it happened.