Irena messed computer up

As some of you know hurricane Irene just came through the Eastern coast of the United States and one of my computers were still left on which was a bad idea, but the power cut out during the storm which cut the computer off..then the power came back on which meant the computer came back on and kept repeating a few times every so hours.

Our electric company won't have the power up until tomorrow, but for now we have a generator to have the other computers on, bathrooms, etc, but my computer is still messing up.

The computer will turn on, but it will just show the desk top background, but none of the windows settings or programs.

Anyone have any idea? I have tried system restore, and a few others. Nothing worked.

 

Prolly has a short somewhere that got messed up from the power going out.

 

Ill look into it some more, but thanks for the post. Anyone else have any idea?

 

My guess is a harddrive problem, try reinstalling windows(try to backup anything you need to keep, if you can't badluck.)

 

How did you do a restore without using any menus?

Also like noodles said it sounds like it potentially could be a hard drive problem. If you have another HDD with an OS on it or you have some Linux live CD's try them and if they work that will pretty much tell us it's something involving the hard drive.

 

You can't use another hdd with an OS on it but if you have the OS disk you can try booting off it and I'd get anything of value that you want off and then just a full reinstall IMO.

 

^^Why couldn't he? So long as he's not using XP the OS will usually work after a hardware change, most likely requiring a reactivation.

 

It almost sounds like the Windows Explorer process is gone. I once accidentally deleted it when messing with Windows Task Manager, and my computer only showed the background wallpaper of my desktop with no icons/bottom taskbar/start menu. I don't know if it would have any relevance to the hurricane messing up your computer though =/.

 

Click Alt+Ctl+Delete at the same time. Open Task manager
Go to processes and see whether "explorer.exe" is open up. That is basically the main thing where all your files, programs etc. is loaded from.

Could possibly have gone missing from your PC or something as always if you restart it it should load up anyways.