Windows booting question

[Lil Chris]

I have a question...
My friend has a laptop that he says the hard drive is absolutely full, so full in fact the computer won't even boot up... Now, I haven't seen it yet or what it's doing... but is there a way to remedy this situation...?

I told him i thought he could use his thumb drive to let the system temporarily boot (it's 2 gigs), but I don't know exactly how to do this...?

Does anybody have any suggestions...?

[ixmatus]

"So full it won't boot up..." sounds pretty silly to me, but, if that is indeed the case I would simply recommend booting from a LiveCD or jump drive, saving what you have on the disk to a networked drive, and doing a reinstall.

I haven't ever ran into a situation where the OS overwrote its own boot sector unless I specifically told it to do so (no matter how 'full' it got).

Maybe, if he is savvy enough, he can load a microlinux (?) distro onto a jumpdrive with Samba installed on it to extract his needed data. Nonetheless, backups should have been performed as well, now maybe he will have the needed impetus.

[Lil Chris]

Thanks,
Like I said I haven't actually seen the PC in question, he said it just won't boot up, and thought the hard drive was full (it's only 20 gigs) it was one of those 400.00 dell jobbies... He did buy a mac laptop recently and they were able to copy some files over to the mac (they had to remove the HD to do it though)... So I'm actually not too sure of what the problem might be... Full HD was our hypothesis (this may not even be the problem)...

[mellom]

Yeah I've never heard of a full HD being the root of a system not booting. I would first ask what messages he/she is seeing and try to remedy the problem by booting into Safe Mode.

[Minsc]

I don't know how Windows boots so I don't know if it would refuse to boot if your drive was full(is this Windows 98 or Windows NT?).

Anyway, if you were feeling lucky:
-Either find a Linux distro that can boot from a disk and has something installed to give it full write support for NTFS, or make one. You could probably download Lunar, fix it so that it doesn't need to write to files to boot(you could do this easily with a boot option if said computer has a couple hundred megabytes of RAM), and install the NTFS write program on it. Also, I'm not sure how to install GRUB on a CD.
-Use your boot disk to delete some files. This is kind of risky since it might actually corrupt your drive depending on how good the software you're using is.
-(if you're using Windows 98, ME, 95, ect, you could just delete files with any Linux install that has FAT support, which would be most of them, and you won't have to worry about messing up your drive although FAT doesn't have any protection from computer crashes)

Or you could just install Windows on another drive, use it do delete some files, and then go back and fix up whatever it did to the old drive. (last time I tried to do this, it managed to somehow make the drive undetectable to my BIOS, cfdisk, the Windows installer, anything except for itself)

EDIT: So do you know the OS version and error message?

[Lil Chris]

Just that the OS is XP and he said he turns on the pc and nothing shows up on the screen (I'm assuming everything turns on ok, like the battery is charged and that the screen does come on and things like that...)

[Brutha]

Even if you totally remove the harddisc your computer should give you something on the screen.

[Lil Chris]

That's what I thought... (like the DOS boot screen or something)... I don't know I'll just have to wait and see it in person I guess...

[ixmatus]

Starting to sound like a bad BIOS to me. He should be able to atleast see a BIOS boot screen.

Otherwise, Minsc did give good advice as well - so if you can rule out the bad BIOS then I would give a Linux live cd a chance.