What do you do if your Windows PC won't boot and you don't have or can't find the install CD.

1. Switch the boot order, usually F12 or F2, most modern PCs have a rescue partition that you can access via CMOS/BIOS/SETUP what ever you want to call it or by booting off the second partition on your hard drive instead of the first one.
2. If you don't have a rescue partition or can't figure out how to boot from it but you do have access to another computer running the same version of Windows:
   1. Go to slax.org and download a copy of SLAX
   2. Then from your working PC burn the CD from the SLAX ISO image. Don't just put the ISO file on the CD though, you have to Burn the Image.
   3. Boot your dead PC off of the SLAX CD.
   4. Next, if it boots you to command prompt, type root [ENTER] then toor [ENTER] then startx.
   5. Once you are in the beautiful Windows like interface, click on the computer looking icon and pick Storage Media, in there you should find one or more icons that look like hard drives. If you don't know what a hard drive looks like, they will be labeled hda or hda1 or hdb1 or sda, you get the idea. Click on one, go inside, if you find one that contains windows or winnt and Documents and Settings and Program Files, that is your broken Windows hard drive.
   6. Now, on your computer that works, share your C drive but make sure you password protect it so that no one can get in there and mess it up too.
   7. In SLAX, next to the computer looking icon there should be on that looks like the Earth with half a gear around it from 5 o'clock to 10 o'clock. Click on that, it's called Konquorer. Konquorer is a Web Browser file manager a la Internet/Windows Explorer.
   8. When you open Konquorer the default page will have links to various parts of you system and web sites, click on Network Folders.
   9. Now, in Network Folders, click Samba Shares.
   10. You should now have a list of all of the workgroups and domains on your LAN.
   11. Find the computer who's drive C you shared by opening workgroups and domains until you find the computer, and when you find it click on drive C.
       
   12. You should now have the computer who's drive C you just shared, if not, burn the missing files onto a CD or, if you are an antiques collector, a floppy disk.
   13. Once you have the media with you needed files open in Konquorer whether via CD, Floppy, or Share, right click on the file you need and then click copy.
   14. Now go back to the first copy of Konquorer that you opened in step 5 even before I explained what Konquorer was, and in the white space somewhere inside your C drive which will be labeled something like hda1 and not C right click and then pick paste.
   15. If nothing happens, look around everywhere on the screen for some kind of error message or feed back. Some versions of SLAX mount NTFS file systems in read only mode which is not a problem. Open another tab in Konquorer or if you don't know how to do that open another copy of Konquorer and go to www.slax.org
   16. If step 14 did not work due to write permissions it is because the ntfs driver used is a read only driver so you will click on modules at www.slax.org and then scroll to the bottom of the modules page and type Fuse-NTFS into the search field and click Search.
   17. Click on the newest version of Fuse-NTFS for your version of SLAX. If the module does not say you can assume that it is compatible with any version of SLAX of the 5.x.x variety, if it says for SLAX 6, then it will work with SLAX 6. As of this writing, you want Fuse-NTFS 2.6.0.
   18. Download, Save As, to Desktop, ....
   19. Now, when it is done downloading, go to the Konquorer with your C drive (remember, something like hda or hdb2).
   20. Right click on your C drive and pick Unmount.
   21. Click on that black box at the bottom of the screen, it is supposed to look like a computer monitor, and in fact, it actually does - Konsole (Terminal Program)
   22. You should now be at the command prompt, type, but don't hit enter afterwards: ntfs-3g /dev/hda1 /media/hda1
   23. Now, before you hit enter, replace the hda1 with the actual name of your drive C which may in fact be hda1 but it might be something different, like sda1.
   24. Now, if Konquorer's location/address bar said /mnt/hda1 instead of /media/hda1 replace media with mnt.
   25. Hit enter.
   26. Now you should be able to write (paste) to your drive C. If you still can't, try closing all copies of Konquorer. If you still can't, you will have to copy via terminal. The command to copy is cp, here's an example: cp /media/cdrom0/ntldr /media/hda1 Where ntldr is the file you are copying from a CD and hda1 is your drive C
   27. Since your dead PC has network access and an internet browser, you can keep searching for solutions and try things out right there on the computer you are trying to resurrect.
       
   28. If you still can't boot into Windows, maybe you should switch to Linux, I like Kubuntu myself.