HP BSOD

[meatsauce]

I have an HP laptop about five years old. No major issues until one day I turn it on and it acts like its going to come on then immediately restarts over and over. If I try to enter using safe mode I get the dreaded blue screen of death. Any help I can find involves downloads but, as the computer wont start, downloads are impossible. Can it be helped or should I trash it? Any help or words of wisdom would be appreciated. It would be nice to have a second pc again but really what I care about is all my pictures that I sadly didn't back up.

[alma]

You need to find a buddy with a PC that you can drop your hard drive into as a second (slave) drive. See whether you can access you pictures.

Does you have your your Windows CD? You can try booting from that and reloading the operating system. Just make sure you select to keep programs and files instead of doing a full clean operating system build.

[meatsauce]

Thanks - Ill try to find my Windows CD

[zhuk]

If the Windows CD doesn't work, and you just want a second computer you can try what I did with an old XP system I'd been given which went into a similar endless BSOD-reboot - download Linux from your working PC and burn a boot disk. I did this with Ubuntu and the installation was a breeze...get it to install over the old (dead) Windows OS and voila, working computer!

Apart from all the old data still on my Win 7 PC I actually like this interface a lot better. No av progs to worry about and no endless windows updates etc either.

Edited March 29, 2014 by zhuk

[alma]

Great idea