XP Repair

Roady

Roady

Roady

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
8,565
Location
Hereford
Have a PC with SATA HDD

Been working fine and then one day just freezes, had to be reset and since then windows will not boot, even in safe mode... Displays windows logo screen, then goes blank with a total hardware freeze (no ctrl+alt+del etc, no caps lock)

Done fixboot, fixmbr, etc etc from recovery console, no joy.

Followed the typical 'how to recover from corrupted registry' MSKB article, no joy.

Done complete memtest, hdd diagnostic tests, no problems found.

So i attempt to do a windows repair install and the windows setup does not list the existing installation (so it doesn't give me repair option).

Have ghosted the SATA disk to a PATA and amended boot.ini to point to the correct disk yet windows still doesn't boot.

Anyone got any other ideas before i do a format+fresh install?
 
you need to acces recovery console, then
copy the boot.ini file from C:\Windows\repair to C:\windows\system32\config

i.e.

copy C:\Windows\repair C:\windows\system32\config

and thatshould hopefuly allow you log into windows.
 
Hi chris, sorry but there is no boot.ini in c:\windows\repair

i've recreated the boot.ini by using bootcfg /rebuild and copied ntldr and ntdetect from the xp cd as well to try and get the setup to detect the installation, bootcfg certainly found it, but the setup still refuses too!

Is there an in-place forced repair i can do? (eg delete \windows\system32 then just install windows in the same folder, overwriting files?)
 
It sounds to me like when windows frozed, the partition did'nt unmount properly. It might be worth downloading a linux distro that runs from your dvd drive and try to mount the partition from that and then shut down normally. That way the partition will then be unmounted properly.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom