I think I've killed my system

Solnyshko

Solnyshko

Solnyshko

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A few days ago I rushed an interminably long windows shut-down by pressing and holding down the power switch.

Now, whenever i try to start my PC it gets as far as the Window's is Starting Up page (kind of pre log on) before suddenly crashing to a blue screen of death stating:

BAD_POOL_CALLER

***STOP: 0X000000C2 (0X00000043, 0XC92B5000, 0X00000000, 0X00000000)

did i damage the boot sector? my drives still appear during the boot up sequence so hopefully it's not physical

I've tried tweaking BIOS settings and F8 safe settings windows startups but invariably end up here

completely at a loss
 
erm reformatting is certainly not an option (too much valuable data at stake) might have to buy a new drive and reinstall the OS - but certainly must recover the contents of this drive which includes 5 years worth of photography work

is there not a way of repairing the boot sector?
 
If you run the windows set up again it should give you the option to just do a re-install which should leave all non-windows files still on the drive, would double check that though.
 
If you have irreplacable data with no backups I would suggest just buying a new drive and installing windows and then putting the other drive in as a secondary so you can copy the data off and backup on dvds.

Trying to repair drives and windows although pretty straight forward always seems to end up going wrong. :S

Maybe I'm just a bit stupid but it just always seems to go wrong.
 
Solnyshko said:
erm reformatting is certainly not an option (too much valuable data at stake) might have to buy a new drive and reinstall the OS - but certainly must recover the contents of this drive which includes 5 years worth of photography work

is there not a way of repairing the boot sector?
Click to expand...

One way or the other your data should be safe.....this time.

Learn from this and take regular backups. Critical data should have 2 backups just in case.

I would not want to lose 5 years worth of data, but I've seen to many clients that do nothing until it happens to them.

Info

A Stop 0xC2 message might occur after installing a faulty device driver, system service, or firmware. If a Stop message lists a driver by name, disable, remove, or roll back the driver to correct the problem. If disabling or removing drivers resolves the issues, contact the manufacturer about a possible update. Using updated software is especially important for multimedia applications, antivirus scanners, DVD playback, and CD mastering tools.

A Stop 0xC2 message might also be due to failing or defective hardware. If a Stop message points to a category of devices (such as disk controllers, for example), try removing or replacing the hardware to determine if it is causing the problem.
 
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Is this XP or Vista? Vista will do an auto repair of the boot files and may allow you to fix the current OS without re-installing. Simply boot off the Vista DVD and select "repair".

Hmm maybe not, looks like something else is damaged. Maybe a repair *could* fix it. Also, if need be, you may not need to format, try re-installing using the existing file system, this will keep your documents and files on the hard drive. In Vista, it puts the files into a folder called "windows.old" otherwise with XP, if you re-install, ensure you use a different logon name as it *could* over write your old documents.
 
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boot to a recovery console. insert your xp disk and start setup as normal. the first option screen you get to, press 'r'. from there you can run these commands...

chkdsk (i can't remember the commands so use 'help chkdsk' for that)
fixboot
fixmbr

no guarantees of course - it might do nothing. but as mentioned above, backup - or at least store sensitive stuff on another partition. if windows goes belly up, you can format it without having to worry. (not an ideal solution. you still have hard disk failure to conisder. always have at least 2 copies of important files on different media)
 
You could always get a Linux Live CD such as SLAX or Ubuntu.

Get an external drive or plug in a secondary drive and navigate through the primary hard disk and find all important data, copy across to secondary drive.

Then re-install windows after all data has been copied.
 
Wow - thanks for all the responses. I certainly (classically too late) recognise the necessity for regularly backing up critical data, and believe you me i wont putting myself in this position again in the future.

FYI using XP Pro

I've tried booting using the windows CD but oddly when selecting the 'repair windows' option, it informs me that windows cannot find any physical drives present - which is nonsense as my twin Samsung Spinpoints appear during the booting sequence. could this be something to do with them being SATA drives do you think?
 
swinnie said:
Try booting with a live cd such as slax (http://www.slax.org/) and seeing if your hard drive can be found that way.

I doubt it would have anything to do with them being SATA.
Click to expand...

Live CD? Will look into it

I seem to recall this being an issue years ago when i initially installed the operating system - for some reason the windows install disk could not see my drives, and i had to find a work around some sort of boot disk (FSdisk?) with the relevant drivers. but as i say they appear in the boot screen (white text on black) but when booting off the Windows CD, after loading all virtual drivers etc it (the windows install routine) claims not to see any physical drives.

another option i suppose to try an emergency boot/recovery disk (floppy?) can these be retro-engineered - ie a generic recovery boot disk that will work with any PC?
 
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'fdisk' means deleting all data off of the disk so that wouldn't be a good idea!

A Linux Live CD can be downloaded and put on a CDROM and booted from, it is a condensed version of linux. It has got me out of issues like this a few times.
 
you could try pressing f8 before your hdd is accsessed during boot and select last known good configuration ? its worked for me in the past lol
 
RAID Drivers?
Usally you need to for Windows Setup to detect your drives. I made an XP Pro CD with my SATA drivers so it loaded it same time. Otherwise Windows Setup tells me no Hard drives installed...

Worth a try?
 
might give this Linex thing a bash

I'll steer well clear of fdisk then! blimey :eek: (but i think we might be talking cross purposes here - as what i have in mind is a small utility - the exact name escapes me)

f8 'last known good configuration' no good i'm afraid

it is a RAID mobo - but I'm not using it in my confuration. - s'pose it could be a controller issue though
 
It will be the controller issue.

You will need to either slipstream the sata drivers onto an xp install cd or connect an ide drive install windowws on that, load sata drivers, copy files to ide, then reformat and install onto sata with drivers at f6 prompt

nlite - http://www.nliteos.com/ allows you to slipstream your xp install
 
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