Are you facing repeated problems while starting your computer? Or your system hangs up often while you are working on it? Then, chances are that your system is gradually heading towards corruption, which may lead to data loss or inaccessibility. In such cases, you should find out the exact cause of the problem and try to figure out the appropriate resolution. If you are not able to resolve the issue, then you should use a third-party Windows data recovery software to recover Windows files.

Consider a scenario wherein you are using a Windows XP system. When you start the system, it fails to boot. It stops at a blue screen and displays the following error message:

“Setup has encountered a fatal error that prevents it from continuing.

Contact your product support representative for assistance. The following status will assist them in diagnosing the problem.

(0×4, 0×1, 0, 0)

Setup cannot continue. Power down or reboot your computer now.”

Cause:

There could be numerous causes for this problem. They are:

  • Boot sector viruses: Your computer may have been hit by a boot sector virus thereby disabling you to start the system.

  • Device driver issues: A device driver that is needed at startup is either corrupted or missing.

  • Hardware issues: If there is a resource conflict between the boot controller and SCSI drives.

  • Other miscellaneous issues: The boot volume is corrupted, because of which the system is unable to boot.

Resolution:

To resolve this issues, you need to perform either or all of the following methods:

  • Update BIOS settings: Check if the computer BIOS is updated. If not, then update the BIOS settings and other hardware drivers.

  • Use the Last Known Good Configuration option: This option usually works find if you have recently added an incompatible hardware device for disk controller.

  • Use in-place Repair option: Use the Windows XP CD-ROM to perform an in-place repair of Windows XP operating system.

  • Restore a registry backup: You should look to perform registry backup of the Windows XP system. However, you should perform this in proper guidance and assistance of a technical person.

After performing the aforementioned methods, restart your system and check if it is starting well. If not, then you should use a third-party Windows data recovery software to recover Windows files from it. Such Windows data recovery tools are read-only in nature that do not overwrite the existing data while scanning.

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery is a Windows data recovery software that is able to recover Windows files from FAT, NTFS, and exFAT file systems. It recovers more than 185 different file types from various storage media such as hard drives, external HDDs, pen drives, iPods, etc. In addition, this Windows data recovery utility is competent enough to recover deleted emails from Outlook Express and MS Outlook. It is compatible with Windows 7, Vista, Server 2003, XP, and 2000.