Ask A Geek

Q: I recently installed a new hard drive in a Dell XPS 400. I had to purchase a recovery disk from Dell since one was sent on original purchase. I could not access the Internet which I found out later that I needed to reload the drivers. After downloading the driver for the Intel pro 1000 pl, I installed it, but still cannot gain Internet access.

Q: I restored an image of my Windows XP operating system. The image was created in August, however, before restoring it, I had neglected to backup the My Documents folder. So I’m stuck with a version of My Documents that doesn’t include any modifications I had made to it during September. Is there anyway of recovering the overwritten data from September?

Not sure if “Stellar Phoenix Partition Recovery Software” or any other recovery software can accomplish this.

Q: When I pressed F11 for recovery I could not find any of my documents. Where can I look for them?

Q: Yesterday when I logged onto my computer it kept going into hibernation randomly and I couldn’t start it back up. So I restarted my computer and logged back on. About 10-15 min later it did it again, so I restarted again and logged back on. I went to go to control panel to turn hibernation mode off and it froze and I kept trying to change the setting but it would freeze on me. I decided to do a System Recovery (because I thought I had a virus) and things were going fine but in the middle of it it went into hibernation mode an I couldn’t get out of it. I waited about 15 min for it to turn back on, but it didn’t so I was forced to restart it. When I logged back on Windows wouldn’t come up and this Error message came up

Windows could not start because of an error in the software.
Please report this problem as: load needed DLLs for kernel.
Please contact your support person to report this problem.

After I read this I pressed enter and my computer restarted and gave me this message. I tried to do another system recovery but it went into hibernation mode after 10-15 min into the process.

Is there a way to turn off hibernation mode, w/o being able to go to the control panel? and is there any other way I can fix this problem?

I’m using Windows XP, and my computer didn’t come with a recovery disk. (the recovery option come sup at start up).

Q: When I tried to compress my HP recovery drive I get the error message

Invalid root in registry key ” HKLM\SOFTWARE\Hewlett-Packard\HPActiveSupport\HPLDR\Cpmpact” code 80070002

can this be fixed?

Q: How do I restore my computer to the way it came out of the box but with no recovery disk?

Q: Where can I find a free picture recovering program to retrieve deleted pictures from my Pentax camera? I found one which was a free download but it then required me to pay upon finding my pictures and selecting the recovery of them.

Q: How do you use recovery CD to recover your computer?

Q: Is there a way to retrieve mail deleted over a year ago?

A: Unfortunately, since it has been a little over a year your chances are not good. When you receive an email from someone that information is received by your email system provider (ex: outlook, AOL, etc) and then when you check your mail the emails are downloaded for you to view. Many times these providers will store the email on the server for a certain period of time but I would think after a year that would be impossible to recover.

Many email programs either compact or encrypt the messages after they have been deleted which would render the email unreadable if you even were able to find the files. Most programs also save email as text files and they are constantly overwritten making the files unrecoverable after a short period of time.

I am sorry, as I am sure this is not the answer you wanted but there is virtually nothing that can be done to retrieve it at this point except to contact the ISP that handles your email and ask them if there is anyway they can get the emails back.