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floppies, in 2009Kris went to her computer this morning to check email, play some mafia wars, read some news, and she was met solely with a black screen with blinking cursor during bootup. her computer is an aging Dell Inspiron 8500 with a seagate ST9160821A hard drive. removing the drive and putting in a USB enclosure, I can read all the files. chkdsk completes. yet the dell refuses to boot. windows is exceptionally unhelpful. I don't have a bootable XP3 disc, since the unit originally shipped with SP1, was reinstalled with an OEM copy of SP2 when the drive was replaced, and subsequently updated to SP3 with windows update. so how do I fire up the recovery console and attempt to fix things? downloading the SP3 update ISO from microsoft doesn't work -- it's not bootable. what's left? floppies. not kidding. six floppies. WTF, microsoft? |