Right, my laptop acts up, it aways has.

It's a Gateway so I'm surprised it's lasted as long as it has, my way of keeping it going when it starts getting too slow and such is to put all my files onto my memory stick and to restart the laptop.

Last night I restarted my laptop and it seemed to go OK until it started booting up, at that point the following message was displayed and it stopped doing anything.

BOOTGMR is compressed. CTRL + ALT + DEL to restart
I restarted the thing and the same message was displayed.

Can anyone offer me any help?

In the mean time I am relaying on my brother's kindness so my posting is very likely to slow down.

In my experience, if the Boo Track is contaminated or corrupted, it's time to wipe the drive and reload all programs from square one.

The likely cause is a virus or trojan, but i can't and won't say for sure.

The "Boot Track" (or Master Boot Record) contains all the data for the hard drive "structure": Size, number of blocks, sectors, and segments, file locations and names, fragmentation,etc. f it is lost or corrupted and you cannot restore the entire disk from a backup, the data is lost.

But that is just my opinion ...

Thanks for your help.

I'l sorry though but I put up the wrong info, it says that the BOOTGMR is compressed.

Sorry, can you offer any other help on that?

Does it say:

BOOTGMR? (Master Record)

pr

BOOTMGR? (Manager)

Ii really makes no difference. If either one is corrupted enought to warrant the warning that it is compressed, you can consider the data lost.

Unless you can afford a data recovery specialist -- VERY expensive ...

Even then, it's entirely possible that the data may be irretrievable because the drive has (physically) failed and become unusable ...

Sorry for the bad news, but such is the way of computers.

BOOTGMR

Thanks for your help.

It is possibel that you could take that drive out and place it into another (booting) computer as a secondary drive. when the system boots to the existing drive, you might then be able to access your old one and get any data off of it that you need.

But you will stillalmost certainly have to wipe the whole thing and start again - unless there is a physical issue with the drive, in which case you'll just have to replace it.