Computer Help Needed - Sorry for the Vanity!

prisoner6 | 12/12/2010 | prisoner6

[prisoner6]

Well I usually can figure stuff out myself but am embarrased that I am stumped on this one.

My son goes to Edinboro and accidentally compressed the C drive in his HP 1151NR netbook. That's the only drive and had the XP OS on it. Now it won't boot and of course won't recognize C:.

I've tried everything I can think of...used ethernet to connect it to our PC while he's home and no go.

He does not have an optical drive. Shouldn't there be some way to reset the netbook?

Actually LONG AGO I did something similar to a PC and worked my way around it. Maybe I'm in a senior moment but I can't recall how I did it.

Any suggestions would be GREATLY appreiciated!

[prisoner6]

He DID try booting from a jump drive but the C drive was still not recognized.

Thanks for ANY help!

prisoner6

[combat_boots]

IMO, reformat & restore w/ a backup if possible. The compression header is damaged in some fashion.

[KoRn]

You might be able to try booting to a ‘live CD’ of some kind, and see if it allows you to ‘see’ the drive and decompress it. That might have been what you did by “booting up from a jump drive”.

I’ve known others that compress their system drives without any harm(I prefer not to do it). It could be that your drive is KIA, and happening when the drive was compressed was just a coincidence.

Does the drive still show up in the BIOS?

[Mr. K]

you’re probably going to have to take the hard drive out and put it into an external drive casae and connect it to another computer and uncompress it

there are hard drive plastic cases and USB connectors made just for that

[Mr. K]

casae = case

My eyesight is getting pretty bad in my old age

[Tijeras_Slim]

My son goes to Edinboro

Why does he need a computer there? < /Allegheny Alumni>

[Michael Barnes]

Can you PXE boot it? If so, PXE boot it to a linux live cd/dvd image; mount that drive in loop and uncompress it.

[GeronL]

Of course netbooks don’t have CD drives but you could use an external one I suppose. If someone had an O/S on a bootable memory card I guess you could run Linux or something. After that I’m not sure. I’m not a techie.

[JoeProBono]

re: How do I uncompress a hard drive?
Wednesday, June 7, 2006 at 12:11 pm
Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Larry (1348 messages posted)

Open the command prompt.

Assuming your HD is C, go to the root of C by typing in: cd c:\

Note the space between cd and c

Hit Enter.

At the C:\> prompt, type in: compact /u /s /i

Note the spaces between compact and each switch.

Hit Enter again and let it run to completion, should only take a few minutes.

This command uncompresses all system folders (the /u switch), subfolders (the /s
switch), and ignores any errors (the /i switch) so that the process won’t halt if
it encounters any.

[IllumiNaughtyByNature]

If its less than a year old, HP still offers the 1 yr support on it by calling their support dept. They have helped me out in the past.

[Revolting cat!]

IBAYLIP (In Before Are You Logged In Posts!)

[prisoner6]

Yes it shows up in BIOS. When I try to access it saysboot manageer compressed.

[Greysard]

He DID try booting from a jump drive but the C drive was still not recognized.

As it was said early in the thread, there had to be an error during compression, and the drive is no longer recognized. NTFS is fairly resilient to errors, and it may be possible to recover, but you need to boot from the XP CD (or a USB drive with the recovery setup) and start from there.

There should be a good number of such recovery setups on the net. Some would run a minimalistic XP, other will run Linux. But regardless of the OS, what you want is to identify the damage and then recover the data.

Of course if the netbook has no valuable data on it (as it was meant to be, actually) then you only need to forget about old data and reinstall using the recovery solution that you got with the computer. If it is HP then probably there is a separate partition on the HDD with all the original install files, and that partition can be accessed - and recovery started - through BIOS. That's what I have on my HP desktop box, at least.

[prisoner6]

Wee don’t weem to ba able to get to the command prompt. Can’t get passed the HP boot up screen with a coice of F9 Change boot device order and F10 - BIOS options. WEll we can get into those but then it says Boot Manager is compressed.

[A. Morgan]

Check your FRmail.....

[al baby]

Call your Priest and have him perform an exorcism

[calex59]

Can he boot from safe mode? If so have him restore his computer to a date before he compressed it. This might work IF he can boot to safe mode.

[prisoner6]

Sorry for the spellings, I was keeping an eye on the Steeler game!

[calex59]

Alright, get a XP system CD. Boot up using the cd and when it ask you go to recovery console. At the first line type 1. At the second prompt type in Fixboot c:. This will write a new boot sector to your c drive and should allow you to boot.

[TexasBarak]

Don’t feel bad- I had to post a cry for help last night regarding a virus that had infected my computer. That thread seems to have helped some others, and this one probably will, too.

There’s always a Freeper somewhere who knows how to do just about anything- Freepers Rock!