Desktop issue

[Pringles]

Hi, I'm having a bit of an issue with my computer and was hoping someone might be able to help me out on it. I woke up to my computer being frozen, so before work I just turned it off and came home and booted it up to this:

http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d1...6485/photo.jpg

I thought it was just a fluke, so restarted like normal and it came up again. Now every time I try to reboot, put into safe mode or any of the other modes given as option for reboot, it comes up with this message. I tried leaving it off for an hour and restarting and the same.

Some technical information on it is it's an Emachine T4165 1.6 GHz intel p.4. It's a crappy computer but I only use it for FF11 so I'm not sure what could have changed on it over night. Any help would be appreciated, even though I'm pretty sure it's going to mean I need a new desktop probably. Sorry for the bad picture, I took it with my phone so it's a tad blurry.

[Cephius]

You need to get a hold of the XP CD and boot into the recovery console. From there, type "chkdsk /r" and let it try to find and fix errors on your hard drive.

But yeah, your disk is probably going, I'd back up your data asap and get a new hard drive.

[Pringles]

Ha well I'm boned. I lost that disc years ago when I moved out of my parents home. At this point it's much easier to probably start fresh from a new desktop then try to salvage this thing. It's over 10 years old now and it's run it's course. Considering I only use it for FF11, a new PC would probably work better anyhow. Anyone have any suggestions for a cheap place to get a decent desktop. Don't need much for it tech wise, just use it for FF11 as I said earlier, and if I play 14 when it comes out I'll play it on my ps3. For anything else I use my laptop.

Thanks for the help and response though Cephius

[Cephius]

Well, I imagine there's shit on it you want. You could always borrow a CD from someone else, even one that came with a different brand than you have (Dell, Sony, whatever) to try to get your computer to boot one last time. If you have any techie friends, you can borrow a SATA/IDE to USB adapter to hook up your hard drive to a working computer in order to extract data.

As for a new computer, I'd just go with a cheapo off a website or local store. You don't need anything amazing to run FFXI obviously. The cheapest new machine should do the job.

[xopher]

use your laptop to download an xp cd and do the recovery console thing like he said

[Pringles]

Well, I imagine there's shit on it you want. You could always borrow a CD from someone else, even one that came with a different brand than you have (Dell, Sony, whatever) to try to get your computer to boot one last time. If you have any techie friends, you can borrow a SATA/IDE to USB adapter to hook up your hard drive to a working computer in order to extract data.

Nah, I've already transferred all my files and anything of want off the computer to a USB drive when I bought my laptop two years ago. Most of the programs and games and files I had have been deleted since then too. It basically just is a dummy computer that's only function is ffxi lol.

I'll probably do that just in case I did miss something. I can call my old boss, I believe he probably has one of those adapaters you're talking about so doesn't hurt to try. Thanks again for the help.

use your laptop to download an xp cd and do the recovery console thing like he said
Yesterday 09:45 PM

Would that be something I could google to find? or would I have to torrent it?

[fishstix]

If you look hard enough, you might find it on rapidshare or some equivalent, but the fastest search would probably be a torrent. If you have a vista install cd from your laptop, I think you can do the same thing. Basically, you want to run a scanner to see if there's bad sectors of the harddrive, see if something got corrupted and can be fixed. If you have a friend that knows how to work with computer parts, you can hook up your hard drive into their computer as a secondary harddrive and scan it from their system too.

The computer is pretty old though and emachines weren't that great back then either >.>; As for getting a new computer, it depends on how much you want to spend. Newegg has some decent cheap computers but at the sub $500 price, you pretty much get what you pay for. If the ff14 required specs will be anything like Aion, I wouldn't want to play on any of those though. Maybe go to ibuypower.com or cyberpowerpc.com and order a base configuration, then upgrade it as needed later. Building it yourself is better in the long run, but sounded like you probably wouldn't want to.