This is a short piece about an essential law of life - you only do something after you have got into trouble.
Yesterday, probably from an update to adobe photoshop elements, I rebooted XP only to find that I could not start windows.
I received the screen : "Windows could not start normally, please select from the list below".
Unfortunately, every selection of this list from "safe mode" to "start windows normally did the same thing - reboot the computer!
After some quick Google work on my other computer I found the solution : using windows recovery console (welcome to MsDOS, hope you know about command line interfaces!) and "bootcfg /rebuild".
Detailed instructions can be found here - Thank you Fred!
The lesson though is that I am now taking a couple of steps...
1. Using TrueImage to take a current snapshot of my nicely setup and tweaked current Windows version in case of complete disaster.
2. Creating a boot disk to rebuild this in case I can't get into anything on the system at all - no wonder its always a "Highly Recommended" step.
3. Storing my work on a separate partition so that if I did have to wipe C: then I don't lose all of the hard work I had already done!
4. Considering installing a version of Linux to access the web when Windows is down... a great though if you only have a single computer - you can find just about any computer fix on the web, but its really annoying if you have to pop down to the local internet cafe, print out a bunch of pages, find they don't work, and repeat... when a second OS to get on the web could have saved you a world of trouble.
If you can avoid these problems by taking a little time in prevention you will be very thankful if disaster should ever strike!