Win2K hangs during booting... :-(

[spiffy]

Hi everyone,

Yesterday my Win2K crashed (too many Firefox windows opened, and then I tried to open a media player while waiting for the browsers to reload); when I tried to reboot, the computer hangs around 50% in the "Starting Windows" screen.

I don't think my HD is dead, since it will still try to boot into Win2K; but I think something got corrupted, just not sure if it's hardware or software. I don't have an emergency boot disk, unfortunately -- does anyone have any idea how to troubleshoot this?

I worry that if I try to re-install Win2K over the existing copy, I will lose the data I still have on the drive. At this point I am willing to install the OS onto a new hard disk, transfer everything from the old HD to the new HD -- but is there any way to do this but still preserve all my settings? I can't bear the thought of losing all my bookmarks and other apps that I have so carefully set up...

Any help will be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance!

[JohnnyMalaria]

Have you tried booting to safe mode (press F8 after the initial BIOS stuff has been displayed)?

[AlanHK]

I worry that if I try to re-install Win2K over the existing copy, I will lose the data I still have on the drive.

Most likely part of the registry has been trashed.

However, a severe crash may have damaged the file system.

You can use a diagnostic BootCD, such as http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ to check out the disk. If it's okay, just reinstall Windows.

It would be tedious, but you would only lose program settings, not any data files you have on the disk.
A repair install might even retain those.

[Nelson37]

Just re-install in the same directory, also known as repair install. Don't mess with partitions and formatting and the data will be safe.

The worst thing that could happen is you would have to re-install programs and if you use a new drive, that will happen anyway.

Actually the worst thing that could happen is that the drive only has 30 minutes to live and it dies, right after you complete the re-install. Depending on how important the data is, fire it up as a secondary drive and copy the data to the primary.

You could do this on another PC but if you want to be really paranoid, hook up the new drive all alone on the new PC, do the install, then run a few diags to make sure all is well with the other parts. Then copy the data. Then remove the new drive with new install and data, hook up the old drive all alone, and do the re-install, or repair installation.