Discussion on:

10 things you can do when Windows XP won't boot

CHKDSK /P fixes 95% of all Windows XP boot problems in my experience. It is run from the Recovery Console as described in some of the other steps. Run CHKDSK /P first, then reboot and hope for Windows. If it blue screens again, go back into the Recovery Console and try the "in place upgrade" as described. If you find there is no OS found to "upgrade", reboot, back into the recovery console, and then run BOOTCFG /ADD or /REBUILD, and name the XP install if found. If BOOTCFG /REBUILD wont finish, slave the hard drive in another system and run a full disk check from within Windows. After all 5 tests complete, backup your data just in case, and reinstall HDD in the original PC. Go through the original steps again that I mentioned and oftentimes the XP install will show up for the "in place upgrade". If no luck, well you just backed up, so blow it out and start over. Trust me, this is the way to go.

Hi, Can you help. I have a 60 GB hard drive partioned C and D. While working one day, I got the blue screen. By slaving this disk I have discovered that I can see the D partion - so heads must be ok. What do you suggest is best to recover data from C (primary) partion?. At the moment if I try to boot fromm this it will not.

CHKDSK /P or CHKDSK /R should be the first thing you try and hope for the best.

I have tried everything in the list. When using CHKDSK i get a message that I have "unrecoverable" faults on my disk - does this mean I have no hope- all I want to do is to recover a few important emails in my Outlook folder - is there any other option?

A lot of time and effort can be saved using Ghost or similiar to create backup image file of C drive. Then you do not need to worry about any of the outlined procedures. Keep C drive small (allow space for temporary needs) and you can be back in business in 2 minutes. To cover HDD failure burn image to DVD. IF new HDD needed restore image to it in 2 minutes. I have had countless crashes and boot failures and successfully been back in business in quick time. Note - need at least one extra partition or a slave to put Ghost image on.

I agree that if you have an image to restore but unfortunately I don't (actually I now use Power Quest Drive Image 7). But is there any option left without an image, what about accessing HEX code level?

Peter:

If you really need to access data stored on the hard disk that won't boot, you could try this:

- Take the drive out of the computer
- Configure drive jumpers as a Slave
- Put drive in another XP computer
- Boot into an Administrator level account
- Locate the user account folder containing the files you want to access
- Access the folder's Properties dialog box, select the Security tab, and click the Advanced button
- In the Advance Security Settings dialog box, select the Owner tab and change the owner to your account

You should now be able to access and back up the files you're after

I have gost image but after installation of the image, after few days XP crashes and reboots again. Sometimes just after installation.

When telling you to copy the NTLDR etc files from another computer, failure to mention that going to tools, view and unhide system files will not let you find those files. I just went through this scenario and my system lost the NTLDR on a defrag. Win would not boot up from CD, going to blue screen telling me there was as problem with my computer and loading stopped. Copied the three files from another computer, put floppy in dead system, booted up fine. Then copied those three files from floppy to boot sector of dead computer C:.

Every time one of our PCs reboots we have to go to setup and boot from C as NTLDR is missing. The bad one is a dual core Gateway running XP pro but the used computer seller did not give us the CD. The other has MC 2K5 on it. How do I find it if you can't see it using tools, view, unhide system files? I am new to this sort of thing so I need more basic info than provided here. Thanks in advance for any help.
Also have a PC at work that won't display a wallpaper even though properties says one is selected. Do you know how to fix that?

One still doesn't know how you did it.

My advice. Get yourself an Ubuntu LiveCD (you can request one through shipit and they send it for free and no S&H fee, or you can download it), you can use it to access your drive (yes, ubuntu can read and write ntfs, and does it better than windows itself) or you can use the testdisk/photorec tools to rescue the files if the partition is badly broken, then you can save your files to your "D:" partition or a floppy/usb stick and then install whichever OS you want.

The CHKDSK /P command is diagnostic only...it performs and exhuastive check of the drive, but does not make any changes to the drive. In otherwords, it doesn't fix anything.

Now, on the other hand, the CHKDSK /P /R will locate bad sectors and recover readable information.

Guys,
I am in a same condition, where I cannor boot my XP. When I tried recovery console with the XP cd, When I give "R" for repair, a command prompt comes up as following.

C:\

When i enetered "dir" at the command prompt it was saying that "there is an error processing the command".

and when i went to setup XP again it was showing C drive as "unknown partition" and also showing the whole Drive capacity as "Free Space".

Does that mean, I lost all the data? or is there any way that i can restore my data.

Any kind of input is higly appreciatable in this regard.


Thanks a million,
Kiran.

The Partition Table is an area in the Master Boot Sector that tells the OS where on the drive up to four Partitions are (further Partitions are available by creating one Extended Partition in the Master Boot Sector, then treating the first sector of the Extended Partition as if it were itself a Partition Table and allowing up to four more Virtual Partitions in there).

I don?t know the details on how Windows Dynamic Volumes work, so if you?d upgraded your drive to Dynamic Volumes (needed if you?re using the software RAID features of Windows Server, for instance), you?d need help that I can?t give.

There are various utilities available to fix the Partition Table, either automatically or manually. Be careful that the utility ONLY works with the Partition Table and doesn?t attempt to actually create a blank Partition of the desired type (FAT, FAT32, NTFS, etc.) in newly-created Partitions. FDISK would do the latter, and so would not be suitable for this.

If you have the Resource Toolkit, the DiskProbe Disk Editor tool may do the job, though you do need to know what you?re doing.

You might try to restore the partition with GParted, or try restoring the MBR with Super Grub.

As I said to another guy earlier. You might want to use an ubuntu LiveCD as it allows you to use a set of tools that can in 99% of the cases rescue data off disks that windows gave u p in.

Your talking out of your arse...

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314058

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/bootcons_chkdsk.mspx?mfr=true

Check your resources... Anyone who relies on m$ for accurate info about their products is a wannabe.

I just popped a recovery console and ran chkdsk /p on a laptop the wouldn't boot.

That's it.

I'm now looking at a login screen.

Have read most of you well written article on recovery for booting. However, I didn't set a pass word for admin. so when it wouldn't let continue without one I had to shut the system down.

Hi Sher---
In my experience there is often no password for that, so try hitting the RETURN key.

Let me know?

Good luck.

If you can't get onto the system because of an unknown Admin password, try Austrumi. It's freeware that will allow you to change the Admin password and to edit your registry. You can Google Austrumi and download the .iso file. I put it on a 50MB CD and ran it on several systems myself. Works great and you can't beat the price.

......you get a boot error on the hard disk.
I can boot from CD and get in to the Repair Console and get to c:\windows.
When I do a dir of this folder it goes part way through and then errors.
If I try accessing "c:\documents and settings" I get a permission error.
What options do I have?

Have been through the list (original problem was XP continually rebooting in a loop), and have now tried the upgrade in place. Loaded up from XP disc, pressed enter, pressed R, all the files finished copying over, prompted to remove any floppies, and guess what it rebooted and went back square 1 and tried to start the install from scratch again.

I re-installed windows a week ago to have a nice clean start because I was getting spurious freezes (no blue screen or error when I rebooted). Was OK initially but now stuck in a deadly embrace!

Anyone see this anything like this before?

Has anyone had this scenario

Have you got any devices that are out of the ordinary or that use unsigned drivers?

I'd strip down to the bare bones and see what that does. Then add devices one by one.

The BEST solution is http://pclinuxos.com install, after it is booted, and all files on the drive are burned to CDrom, DVDrom, or copied to an external USB or FW drive.

Installed, PCLinuxOS will provide any Pentium Class computer of 128Mb RAM - 5500 games, programs, Office Suites, Browsers, scientific applications, and, multi-tasking, multi-processing, 20 desktop environments.

Benchmark testing (over 30 tests, and 'shoot-outs', by hardware sites and PC mags in the past 6 years) proves that most processes run upto 50X faster in GNU/Linux, than is possible in any Microsoft OS.

When any of my client's friend's or partner's computers suffers a 'Microsoft disease', I know that the cure is GNU/Linux, for Security, Stability, immunity from the "114,000 Microsoft Virus Definitions", and protection from Spybots, and Trojans.

Friends don't let friends use Microsoft, when GNU/Linux is FREE. Source code for the OS and all 5500 applications and programs is FREE to download.

Well said linuxiac. I myself carry a copy of kubuntu with me every time I need to fix someone else's computer problems 'cause I can pull their stuff off the broken drives and then install linux in them.

I divided my partition into 2. Installed XP pro on drive C. Program Files & data on drive D. When XP won't boot, I format C & reinstall XP pro again. It works for one day. When I switched on the PC the next day, it won't boot again. So, I installed XP Pro again. It works fine again, for that day. The next day, when I turned on the pc. It wont boot again. Every day I have to reinstall XP pro each time I turn on pc.

This time I split drive C to 2. Installed XP pro. Expecting tomorrow it will not boot again. Then I would install XP pro on the next partition, this will go on, until I finally meet my doom. Oh what a sad life. What a slow death.

My guess is your hdd is faulty.

I usually create a small, 500-600 meg patrition on C for the boot files, then put the OS on D and the Program Files on E. Sometimes use a dual boot, a 2nd OS installed on the same PC, makes it easier to backup the main OS.

I had a similar issues yesterday, my PC wouldn't boot, and I did a repair/upgrade to windows and after th einstall it booted fine. When I shut it down and attempted to boot again, it wouldn't boot.

I still don't know what the problem is, which is why i am here looking for an answer, however I did figure out a work around that allows me to boot.

When the system is starting, my bios says Press del to edit the bios ( or something like that) or F12 for boot menu. I select the boot menu, hard drive, then select the proper physical drive, and it boots for me, wish I had done that before doing a repair/upgrade on XP.

Go directly to post #28 ~ Read Article completely and there within you shall be made available to you my Failsafe Boot.ini for $2.oo USD thru Donations or $5.oo USD for the purchase of My License to assist a Disabled Veitnam Veteran and or Disabled Minister. Here you will find the details on how to obtain my 3? Floppy or 4" 1.4GB cdDvd called Startup 9xp for Win9x and Startup mxp for Later ntfs operating systems.

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"Trust me...this is the way to go." I trusted you and sure enough it was indeed the way to go. Nothing else had worked..I was about to give up. This saved my skin! Thanks for the advice!

This shows up the basic inherent fault with any Windows
OS....there is nothing definitive about solving problems.
Microsoft have tinkered it into THE most unstable OS it could
possible be!

I love my Mac....never...ever...one single problem! Behaves
itself impecably.

I agree with you. chkdsk /p should be first thing to try.
Just want to ask -if the machine has 2 SATA hard disk can we swap around the hard disk instead of going to second machine

My computer has gotten corrupted. When in Windows (which only parts of it now work) it will recognize and run the floppy and either of the CD rom drives. If I try and boot up from either the floppy or the Windows XP CDrom, "Windows Setup" starts (The blue screen) but nothing at all happens afterwards (I've left it for hours, just in case it was merely slow). So, I can't boot thee computer up "on its own" to be able to repair or reinstall Windows. Any suggestions? - I'm really stuck... Ian (Australia)

Used X P Pro SUD which worked wonderfully. Thank you very much!! But where to go from here? I had just installed Comodo firewall which asked me to reboot to complete the installation, upon start up i get prompt for Dell Resource CD files (install or uninstall). I haven't recently had anything to do with Dell cd. I am still getting dell prompt. Have already done a complete check disk at start up. I could see the drive as a slave. But as a main drive Windows will not boot. Just says there is no drive. sincerely, Brian

Hi Greg,

That's a nice article you have here.

I am living in Microsoft *hell* with my PC. Try this scenario out for size.

I'm running Windows XP SP2 on a Toshiba 1955-S803 laptop, circa 2002, a pretty modern machine. It's been running fine for a long time. I run mostly Outlook Express, IE, Excel, and Word, all standard Microsoft apps.

1) I try to install Microsoft's free version of visual studio 2005 (c#, c++, VB, j#, etc.) and all of them fail saying I have some configuration compatibility problem.
2) I buy Microsoft office 2003 and try to install it but the install program never gets to the screen where I can actually start it. It dies while inventorying my system, issuing no diagnostic message (good stuff Bill!).
3) So I think it could be that it's because I've missed some updates. (I turn off automatic updates because of past problems with it.) I go through the exercise of turning on updates and getting everything microsoft says I'm suppose to have with my configuration. This is 37 updates, most (35) of which are "security" updates. At then end of an hour (downloading and applying the updates), it tells me to reboot to finish the process.

Upon clicking "ok" to reboot now, my computer goes into a reboot loop. It just keeps rebooting and rebooting. My guess is that means it is hitting a system failure before it completes the process and it is set to automatically reboot on a system failure.

Ok, so that's the setup for my problem. Watch where I go from here.

First, the machine won't boot in any mode. Microsoft gives you lots of options but *none* of them work with this machine in this state.

Second, Toshiba doesn't give me a CD with the recovery console on it so I can't use the built-in 'restore system' feature of Microsoft's.

But I do have skeelz and Knoppix, plus I have previously successfully recovered from exactly the same situation.

So I use my Knoppix to get to the 'system volume information' folder, which is where Microsoft saves off the "snapshot" folders with sets of the critical files. When you invoke Microsoft's "restore system" feature and "restore to snapshot" of the system you are actually replacing 5 files with previous versions of themselves. The 5 files are

SAM
SECURITY
SOFTWARE
SYSTEM
DEFAULT

With Knoppix I can see that I have what looks like hundreds of snapshot folders to choose from, the highest numbered one is RP450 (restore point 450). And with Knoppix, I can put these files back onto my Windows disk (yes folks, there is a way to mount ntfs partitioned disks for linux to write to!).

And now I've tried it for RP446 throught RP450 and I've got the results. (Why did he try so many you might ask.)

For each one, upon rebooting Microsoft complains that my 'SYSTEM' file is missing or corrupt. This seems so odd because, of course, I know it is there since I put it there and I can see it!! And it doesn't make sense that it is corrupt because it is exactly the same as the one that is in the restore point directory which only got there because Microsoft put it there! (Where is the corruption in that?)

When this happened to me before, I got my system back on the third restore point that I tried. Was that sheer dumb luck?

Am I facing a pure 'trial and error' recovery process where I work backwards from RP450 to RP001 (I think I've only got as many as consume 12% of my disk. Isn't that Microsoft's standard for the hidden 'system volume information' folder?)

The standard answer, of course, if I ask microsoft, is that I have to reload my operating system from the way it was out of the box. Greg, that is 3+ years ago!! I don't want to have to reload every piece of software I've loaded since then (I test drive a lot of software).

Is there any way I can figure out which restore point will work without having to go throught the trial and error process???? It takes about 30 minutes per restore point to do the entire process (boot knoppix, load the ntfs drivers, copy the 5 files into place, then boot windows, go back to boot knoppix again, etc.).

Can you imagine a worse user experience with an operating system than this??

Thanks Bill, for all this *hell*!

Greg, have you encountered this situation before?

Cheers,
Mark

If you are experiencing this much difficulty in the actual operating of the computer why would you not want to do the reinstall of the operating system?

I realize that there is years worth of application
information on the computer but what are you worried about losing, data or application settings?

I have run into numerous situations that were as bad as this but I found that it is simpler to reinstall the OS than to fight with it for any length of time. Image the drive and start from scratch is my opinion, You will save yourself a lot of headache.

I've spent 30 hours, spread over 3 years, getting the right configuration of the right set of software to do the specialized things I do set up just the way I want them on this computer.

If I reinstall XP on this machine as you suggest I will have to spend that 30 hours again. Do you understand this?

So what you're offering is that I spend 1-2 hours reinstalling XP and then spend another 30 hours getting all the rest of my configuration back by redoing all that work.

As opposed to restoring a previously working configuration from one of the 75 restore points. Any one of which takes only 1 hour to restore. The problem I'm having is that, in spite of being advertised as a "restore point" they don't work!

Of course if I end up spending 75 hours and then find *none* of them work, I will end up taking your path and spending a total of over 100 hours trying to get my machine back to the state it was in before...

the only thing I changed was I ran Microsoft UPDATE!!!

OMIGOD, this is *HELL*

Don't you have a better idea that this?

Mr. Shultz, Greg, do you have an idea?

An implace upgrade will straghten out your system files with out messing up your settings.
sounds like you need to invest in ghost, and when you get it like you like it, ghost an image.

As I mentioned in my post, what I'm doing now did work for me before.

On that incident, it took me 3 tries to find a restore point that worked.

So I spent about 3 hours to avoid spending 30 hours using the method you suggest. It will take me about 30 hours to reconfigure my machine running all the software installations that go on top of XP for me to get back to my environment.

Isn't that a good tradeoff?

Its only data I am interested in - some emails in outlook

If it's only data that you're interested in retrieving, try the technique listed in my eariler post titled Slave the Drive and Take Ownership

If I was only interested in the data, I wouldn't be trying so hard to recover the configuration that was working.

if you have such a specialized configuration, why haven't you documented it somewhere so you can reconfigure it without going through the 30 hours of trial and error? it seems like you're willing to spend 75+ hours to *maybe* restore your system but not willing to or interested in spending a few minutes each time you successfully change a setting to document it and know what your system is doing.

I probably have about 20 or so applications outside of the standard Microsoft ones. There is very little guesswork for me. However, a couple of the applications are very big and take a long time to install. One is a GIS system and it, by itself, takes more than 5 hours to install. I've got 2 CAD systems, they take a lot of time to install as well.

I did successfully recover my system without having to re-install (see my other post). I had to resort to Greg's last (#10) idea which, in my situation, meant I had to buy another Windows XP distribution CD.

I probably spent about 12-15 hours on this problem over the last 2 weeks. I only put in 1-3 hours a night and I didn't work on it every night.

Even as bad as this is, it's a lot better than what would have happened if I'd followed Toshiba's approved method (which is to wipe the disk entirely clean, they start with a destructive format).

It's not hindsight that is missing in this business. It's foresight that is missing. Manufacturers like Toshiba and Microsoft have got to have the foresight to understand that it's not always the best customer experience to wipe a disk clean after a Microsoft update hoses a system. It doesn't take much foresight to see it coming.

To begin with, I'm not at all familar with Knoppix or the procedure that you're using. I've heard others talk about it but have never tried it myself...

Anyway, you mentioned that you tried the highest numbered RP450 (restore point 450), but you didn't mention dates. Are you sure that is the most recent version? What about number 1?