telsave

Hi hope someone can help me.

My lap top refuses to boot up from cold. I get to the Windows welcome page and it switches itself off after displaying one of these error codes.

Insufficient resources exist to complete API

No virtual memory or paging quota is available

Application failed to initialize properly

I have tried booting in safe mode; normal mode; best configuration that last worked.

I have tried to boot up through my Windows CD it gets to Windows Starting and switches off.

I did get it working yesterday and (stand by for a laugh ) decided to back everything up to my external HDD which had previous back up both image and incremental. I decided best do an image transfer to get everything backed up as of that day rather than just an incremental. 25% done laptop decides to close down, not only did it not back up but because I was using image transfer which overwrites everything on HDD I lost my previous back ups and also the boot sector record of the external HDD so I cannot use that now until I get the boot sector re-written (How do I do this) and I have now no back ups of my lap top HDD.

Back to the failure of the laptop to start when I boot up, using just the battery, I can boot up OK, I then connect the mains lead to keep laptop running as it is now.

Turning to the external HDD connected via USB it did not appear on the 'My Computer' screen in Windows but did appear in my systems hardware device manager. Using partition find and mount I was able to scan it and get it back onto 'My Computer' screen designated as 'E' drive but I could not access it. I tried formatting using DOS and windows and got the message 'Disk is write protected'.

can anyone suggest how I can reformat the external HDD in this situation please so I can write and image file and incremental back up to it before the computer powers down again.

I am in a bit of a mess and hope someone out there can throw a life line.

Cheers