This morning, my wife’s laptop seemed to be trying to fix some disk corruption on boot-up. It started OK; she did what she needed to do and put it to sleep before heading off to work. I needed to use it this evening, but when I booted there was no desktop background, though there were desktop icons. It seemed that the system tray was not fully populated, and it claimed there was no network. Whenever I try to run any program, or use anything in control panel, I get the error message, “windows cannot access the specified device, path or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item.” This happens on all accounts, limited and admin. I can’t do a thing, but the files all seem OK. I’ve rebooted several times.
It’s a Samsung, so I accessed the Samsung recovery option from boot and chose to restore main windows files, leaving data intact (I’m afraid I don’t keep on top of my wife’s backup regime like I do my own – dreadful behaviour). On reboot it wouldn’t boot so now it’s running Startup Repair. Anyone have any experience of this and any good suggestions? I’ve found a few suggestions here and there, some of which require me to use control panel functions which I can’t, and others which I don’t quite understand any more (I switched to mac and Linux five years ago, and I’ve forgotten a lot of what I used to know about windows systems – I was still on XP and refusing to switch to Vista).
My only thought at the moment is to pull the drive out and put it in a caddy so I can make sure I’ve copied all the documents and pics off it, then do a clean install. Anything better or quicker to do?
