Calling all techies .... your assistance is needed!

My week has been heading downhill from Monday. I came home today in a less-than-enthusiastic mood (considering tomorrow is Friday), only to have my PC completely refuse to boot! After a number of attempts, I booted from the Windows CD, and was thwarted by an incorrect Admin password at the recovery console stage - twice! Couldn't be bothered having three more failed attempts, so out of desperation, I booted again "normally". Fortunately, this time, it worked.

However, I'm living on borrowed time. My PC has been displaying erratic behaviour in a number of respects recently, and I think I only have a limited amount of time to do "something".

So, this is where I need some assistance.

  • I've checked my C: drive and it badly needs a defrag - so, when I go to bed tonight, I'll be kicking that off
  • Obviously, I need to do some backups - fortunately (maybe) most of my data is NOT on the C: drive, so if it's a disk drive problem and it crashes, it's not catastrophic
  • How do I check the integrity of my C: drive these days? Used to be fdisk in the DOS old days (showing my age here!)
  • How do I go about determining if it is actually the disk drive or it's another issue?
  • How do I find out what my "Administrator" password is? - when as far as I'm aware, "I" am the administrator (BTW - I have XP Professional installed)
  • What else can I do/look at before it all comes to a grinding halt?


Hoping there's someone out there who can help me stay connected to AusPhotography!