This week I 'ave been mostly running chkdsk

I've had a run of half a dozen seemingly mortally wounded Windows XP machines to fix this week. All were easily repaired. Most reasonably technical users know of chkdsk, a Microsoft utility that repairs scrambled hard drives, fewer know how effectively it brings PCs back from the dead. More than 80% of the time this simple fix does the job.

One caveat, if you suspect your PC's disc is physically failing, because you can hear unusual noises such as it retrying reads, banging drive heads against the end-stop, screeching or grinding ignore this advice and take steps to recover the data (more on that in a future post). The longer a failing disc runs the less likely it is your files will survive. Unfortunately a lack of odd noises doesn't mean it is not doomed but well under five percent of non booting PCs are suffering from a physical failure so go with the odds and run chkdsk.

When Windows fails to start:

1. Insert any Windows XP CD in the drive (it need not to be the one supplied with the PC) and boot from it. To do so on most PCs hit F11 or F12 at the first (BIOS) screen to bring up a boot menu, select the CD/DVD drive from the list.

2. When prompted press any key to boot from the CD.

3. At the first screen, press R for the recovery console.

4. If asked to select your Windows installation (usually that means hitting 1 followed by enter, then if there is one, enter the administrator password.

5. Type chkdsk /p (and hit enter of course)

6. Once chkdsk has worked its witchcraft reboot and hope.

Good luck.