corrupt partitions

[roger dovey]

i'm new to this and a novice on a pc. i have a laptop running windows xp home sp2. It froze the other day and after about 10 mins it shut itself down.when i restarted it got to the point where windows xp home idition comes on screen and then went blank for a few seconds. then it came up with loads of info about a power failler,windows shut down wrong and loads of other reasons. at the bottom it asked how i wanted windows to start ie: in safe mode , safe mode with networking, and two other start up modes i cant remember. i tried all start up modes only to come back to the same screen as all the options of start up modes. i took laptop to be sorted and they said it had corrupt partitions, whitch set me back £50. what does this meen and could someone tell me if this is something i could repair myself. why did this fault happen? any answers help would be great as i cannot afford to many £50's.

[GlobalForce]

Hi Roger, Welcome to Wilder's!

Could you tell us a bit more about this pc of your's .... how old it is, was it purchased new, second-hand, what disk's if any you may have for it. Are you able to boot up in safe mode without issue's? This would allow us to take a closer look at the installed hardware. These for now please, thank's.

Edit: I'll pass on the op's motive for choosing to {{{remove two previous post's}}}, instead stating the issue turned out to be a small shard of metal lodged inside the laptop's usb phone jack, in effect shorting out the boot process. This came as a suggested possibility by one 'PBtechie' from over on the pb/uk forum's. Once cleared, functionality was restored.


Steve