Q: I reformatted my computer a couple days ago, but something went terribly wrong. I reformatted it about 90% and It stopped and said "Can't read blah blah something ghost file." So It says take it out, to finish completion. I took it out and turned on my computer, but the whole screen was blank. I can't do nothing on the computer, NOTHING. I am at my cousins using their computer, please HELP!!! Thank you. *This is a emergency*
A: get youself a bootable OS, (LiveCD) of any linux flavor that you can get your hands on, popular ones are Knoppix, Ubuntu, most will have a utility called gparted preinstalled. Have it reformart your drive, to raw, and reboot, install your copy of windows from scratch and you should be good, chances are it will rewrite your MBR (master boot record) you can also use your windows disc and go into command line (recovery console) Restart your computer with the Windows XP Setup disk in the CDROM drive. If you are prompted to press a key to start the computer from CDROM, do so quickly. Otherwise it may try to boot from the hard drive. After a few minutes, you'll see a prompt to press the R key to start the Recovery Console. When Recovery Console starts, it will prompt you to enter a number corresponding to the Windows XP installation that you need to repair. In most cases, you'll enter "1" (which will be the only choice). If you press ENTER without typing a number, Recovery Console will quit and restart your computer. Enter your Administrator password. If you don't enter the correct password, you cannot continue. (sometimes it's blank so just hit enter) At the Recovery Console command prompt, type fixmbr and then verify that you want to proceed. Then after the reboot, reinstall windows. or install linux ubuntu is not bad, and easy to use.