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Cannot recover from failed XP upgrade

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9 replies

by kenlea1

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Help! Tried to upgrade Compq Deskpro PII 400, 192Mb RAM, 10Gb HDD, desktop standalone, from '98SE to XP Pro. Did Disk Cleanup and defrag beforehand. Initial attempt failed, with error mess. C: corrupted. Did pre-install virus scan with Norton 2004, found and fixed 200 files, 0 remaining. Norton AV2004 failed to install, however. Subsequent XP upgrades got much further, but still failed on Preparing Installation phase. Now it insists on taking me back to a 'Continue XP Setup' or 'Cancel'. Selecting Cancel (thought I could do a more thorough, boot scan), the Uninstall routine failed, several times. Now it's let me try to reboot from 98, but comes up with 'Command.com not found' etc. and hangs before even loading DOS. Tried an install from boot XP, which would only take me back to the previous Setup attempt, which isn't going anywhere...slowed to a crawl on about 10% of Preparing Installation. For some reason won't boot to floppy at the moment... will try to swap it out if anyone has a decent grasp of DOS to get me back into 98...(if I can't upgrade it, I've at least got to give it back workable...) Currently trying Norton AV boot scan.

9 replies

by cg it

hummm sounds like a mess. In my opinion I would get a floppy drive working and get a DOS boot disk with Fdisk utility on it [or you could use something like partition commander] and start over from scratch. Use the DOS boot disk to boot up to a A:> prompt use the fdisk utility to delete all partitions and then create a primary dos partition [ C: ] and then install XP from the CD. note: fdisk utility is pretty easy. you choose what you want to do by # For instance, once you open up fdisk it will give you choices 1-5 Example #1 would be display active partitions, 4 would be delete partitions which another screen will give you a choice of partitions to delete also # 1 through how many ya got.

BUT if there are programs installed on the primary partition [ C: } like Office or what not those will be lost as well and have to be reinstalled. As the adage goes, backup back up backup all data in case something like this happens.

by cg it

note I said delete ALL partitions and this is in error. Depending upon how the disks were partitioned out and whether or not and just the O/S is on the primary partition. If the O/S is on the primary partition [ C: ] and all other programs reside on other partitions, just delete the primary partition [C: ] create a new one, format it and install the O/S. Other programs residing on other partitions can be recovered by creating shortcuts from the .exe file and placing them on the desktop.

by w2ktechman

If you delete the partition, make sure that you have the installation files for all of your programs. Many programs will not function just by clicking the executable file. They have many registry entries.
Upgrading is also often a hassle, as some programs do not transfer well. Best advice I can give is to backup everything, and do a clean install of XP. then reload everything.

by kenlea1

Realy need to recover existing data, and if possible programs. Could slave to another HDD, backup all data and do clean XP install, but couldn't I simply delete the C:\%WIN_NT$ folder (where all the Setup files for XP are) and modify the boot.ini file or some such?

by myths

I had this problem when I reinstalled Windows XP Home. Got locked into the Continue/Cancel screen and unable to recover from it. I called Microsoft and they managed to get me out of it and back into Windows. You should have 3 free calls to Microsoft support for your Windows XP purchase. The solution might be in the Microsoft Knowledge Base but I couldn't get online to look. Took over an hour with the help of the tech to get out of the lock loop.

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