right... i got on my laptop one day and tried to reinstall my dial up service... well, it wasnt reading the cd so i went into device manager and it had a exclamation mark by it. i disabled, then enabled. that didnt work. i uninstalled, reinstalled. that didnt work. called HP they said put in OS disk and run a repair, did that and then when its finishing it gives me that error. now i cant get into anything. i know how to reformat my computer myself, im just wondering if anyone knows how to save my files my self or if there is another way to fix this problem

 

have you tried running in safe mode? maybe even safe mode with start up prompt to disable the cd-rom driver from loading?

thus you can reinstall the driver via floppy disk...

 

1) how do you start up in safe mode? (i know stupoid question but i forget)
2) i dont have a floppy disk drive

 

hit f8 before the xp boot screen comes up

 

alright, let me try that in a sec and see what happens. im trying to do the repair again

 

good luck

 

and its taking forever....

 

it wont let me get in safe mode.

EDIT: anyone know how best buy is able to save all my files to a disk?

 

all they do is remove the drive, and plug it into another system, them move the files over

 

so if i were to get another laptop from somewhere... i would just swap drives and then copy my harddrive (the one that is in the donor laptop)?