It was a dark and stormy night.
An average dark and stormy night, if you will. I had been happily working on a new photoshop picture in attempts to finish before the end of February. I was so diligently working until my dear housemate invited Kitty and me out for a celebratory feast. It was perfect. We would be social and enjoy ourselves, and I would still be able to finish my lovely artwork which is coming along so nicely.
And so we returned home. I went to the desktop and with my tablet's mouse, went to open Photoshop.
And the tablet decided it didn't want to work anymore.
So here's the deal. I have a Wacom Intuos3 drawing tablet, model PTZ-630. I plug it into the USB port and the little blue light at the top flashes on. When it's working properly, the blue light stays lit as long as the computer's on and it's plugged in. In its malfunctioning state, it blinks for a moment, then shuts off, and neither the mouse or pen works. The desktop computer isn't the most trustworthy one I've ever worked with (when I bought it, it was loaded with viruses, if that says anything :3 But I managed to clean it out and make it useable), so I tried plugging it into my laptop and trying it there. A couple restarts later, and the same thing happens. Windows mentioned on both the desktop and laptop that the "USB Driver is not recognized". This makes virtually no sense, as I've used the tablet extensively on both computers.
Kitty tried to fix things by updating the Wacom driver. This didn't solve the problem. So he returned it to its original driver, and it still didn't work. Finally, he did a system restore to the last save point. Fortunately, this was yesterday evening. That went down without a hitch, but still didn't fix it. We're both fed up at this point and just turn the computer off to RP and watch Disney's Hercules.
So the movie's over and I decide "y'know, what the hell. I'll try booting it up again." And for the past hour or so, the desktop's been rotating through the same three screens and refusing to properly boot up. It appears to be bluescreening and immediately restarting before we can get to the XP Login screen. It won't log into Safe Mode, it won't start normally, and it won't return to "Last Known Good Configuration". Basically, I'm in a state of WTF right now because there's a lot of really important stuff on that computer, like rent account balances and college assignments from everyone in the house. Not to mention a lot of my photoshop files are on there... And every help site Kitty's looking for is telling him that PC Recovery is the only way to go - and from what I understand, that involves completely 86-ing the whole hard drive.
Can anyone please give us any advice? We really need those rent files, and (while it's not the most pressing thing in the world,) I really don't want to lose all of my Photoshop data, including my half-finished February calendar painting. Whether or not I can get my tablet to work, I still want to keep those files, y'know?
Thank you all so much for taking the time to read this.
~Shadowed Spirit Sage
XP?
Can't you do that thing? Where you install a layer of XP over this bonked version, and it doesn't delete your data. Its like a System Fix or something like that? God I wish I could remember things clearly. I did it a few times, and then things worked fine. Hold on *Searches for link*
Oh! It's called a "repair installation"
And link is.... http://www.microsoft.com/...p/support/nostart.mspx#4
Last choice on their bullet list. :O Good luck.
If you cannot boot into xp to get hold of your files "do not format or restore just yet!" you could use one of a various linux bootcd operating systems (someone on this forums with computer skills will be able to point you towards one if i cannot find it soon). These livecds enable you to boot to a linux environment wiithout installing squat (runs off cd/dvd) then you can copy pasta any work you have yet to backup to an external usb drive. (you'll need to get a friend to download and burn the iso to a cd/dvd).
Boot loop of death.
You've got either a driver fouling up the XP startup or the registry/OS itself is corrupt.
1. What does safe mode (true safe mode, no network, no nothing. Just select "Safe Mode") do? Is it the same loop?
2. If it IS doing it in safe mode you have a piece of hardware that's given up the ghost.
3. If that piece of hardware ISN'T the harddrive you have a few methods to salvage data. The easiest is to simply slave in your hard drive to someone else's system. If you don't have that option you can attempt to use linux boot cd/usb to save your work provide
A) You have a place TO save the data with the CD case (Don't ask me, I think that way is pointless.)
B) Make sure you allowed enough room on the USB device to save the data.
~Tobe
Kitty spent the past six or so hours doing just that while I was at work.
Save for a virus scan right now, it's completely and utterly fixed. <3
THANK YOU SO MUCH EVERYONE! YOU SAVED MY LIFE AND DAY <3 <3 <3 **flowers for everyone**
~Shadowed Spirit Sage
puppylinux ftw?
yay, now remember to BACKUP from now on 
*whips*
Backups are definitely your friends.
*looks at his folder full of backups dating back to 02* Hmm... I should probably start cleaning that out, though.
Also if possible make sure you keep at least one backup (as recent as possible) somewhere away from the pc/laptop (even to the extent of a different building). A friend of mine had their laptop nicked, they had their backed up work on a dvd-r still in the machine as well as a usb stick still plugged in D:
