Is there a way to backup my C drive onto an external drive in SAFE mode?

You could try using a product like ghost which enables you to boot from a cd and then create a “snapshot” or image, of your hard drive contents including all required system files.

What you do not want to do is back up your hard drive. If you restore a computer from that back up your newly formatted computer will start behaving like your computer now (ie broken).

What you need to do is transfer off all your files ussually these are in the My Documents folder unless you have saved stuff in other places. Then you need to deauthoirise iTunes if you use it. If you use outlook it saves stuff, emails and calanders etc. somewhere else (can’t remember where but Google should help).

Next you need drivers for all the stuff in computer. At the very least you need the driver for the network card or wireless card or whatever you use to connect to the web otherwise you will be screwed.

Then you format and do a clean install (at this point you can stare in awe at how nice a clean install of XP works). Reinstall the drivers you got earlier, install some Internet security (or activate windows firewall at the very least) then connect to the web and update windows. This can take some time. A lot of time. Once windows is updated reinstall your programs and then copy back the files you saved from the my documents folders.

And there you go. Fun fun fun. Good luck.

Actually, I don’t need the driver for the network card. I booted with SAFE MODE WITH NETWORKING.

But I’m thinking, if I backup the hard drive, even though it’s “broken”, I can still pull stuff from it (pics, docs, etc.), no?

I can’t remember the cause of your woes but at some point reinstalling windows is going to be on the cards and once you have a brand new imstalll of windows you won’t have networking as windows only includes basic drivers. And without access to the net getting the drivers is quite hard. (made that mistake)

As for making a copy of C and transferring the files later there’s no problem with that as such but if the original cause of your problems was some sort of malware then it might result in you reinfecting your new install by mistake (done that too).

edited after I got sick of the iphone

the idea is that with ghost, you can backup the whole system to anexternal drive. The you blow away your c: and install a fresh copy of windows. Install your programs and then pull the files you want, over from your external drive. Once the c: is exactly how you want it, blow away the external hdd. Then you ghost an image of the working c: and if there is ever another catastrophic problem that keeps your computer from booting you can just ghost the internal drive with the image from the external drive. That provides you with a full system recovery option at any given time.
This what I do at home.

Before you do any of that, (I assume you have a Windows xp install disc) you can try a repair install of xp which, if successful, will overwrite your bad OS and not destroy any data. Has worked for me many a time. Boot from your xp disc and proceed with the install, but when it gets to looking for previous installs, (after f 8 the EULA) it hopefully should see your xp partition, and ask if you want to repair it, or install new. (this is not the same as R for repair console) What about system restore? Did you try that in safe mode?

With a SONY Vaio machine, you don’t use Windows disks. You have to use their SONY VAIO Recovery Disks.

Have done several restores.

For some reason, while I’ve been on Fluther, my backgrounds have taken on a pinkish hue.

Can a bad graphics card cause the system to not boot?

If the answer to that is yes, then maybe, if I replace the card I won’t have to restore the c drive??

COMPUTER GEEK offers a service where they will make back up disks starting at $159. Do I want?

GHOST is not installing in SAFE mode.

Yes, Sonys are special… Just as an aside, I have formatted and installed Win XP on almost every kind of pc (including Sonys) with ONE cd; a cloned Dell xp home edition disk. As long as you have a valid product key on your pc, it doesn’t matter. There are tricks to getting all the drivers and such after that.
I understand what you want to do; a full recovery/restore from the original system disks. I use acronis, or DIscwizard, (from Maxtor, a free download) as far as cloning a drive is concerned.
I think video cards can be a problem, is yours onboard or a removable? All my pc stuff is still packed from the move, or I could give you more info;I am using a laptop with nothing on it right now.

Once I was also recomended by a Maxtor tech to use the Maxtor one touch Lite software to backup to an external drive. You can find it here: http://tinyurl.com/Maxtor-Lite

I don’t know if the video card is on board or removable. I’d have to open the machine and I don’t like doing that.

Maybe I should try downloading Diskwizard. Although I have a Norton Ghost disk, it’s not working.

You can tell if you look at the back of the pc; if the video connector is grouped together with all the other plugs, or if it has a slot of its own in the slot ‘area’

What is the model #?

VGN AR-250G

This is a laptop? so no removable vid card. ANy luck with copying to external drive? Can you use Windows (built-in) backup? Do You have access to another computer?

This is a laptop. No luck copying. Windows backup gives me “catastrophic error”.

How would another computer help me?

I was thinking that you could remove your laptop drive and connect it externally to the other pc and shlep the files over that way. Reinstall your laptop drive, do the restore, etc…