Recovery Console won't see partition

My WinXP machine just stopped booting, it crashes during the boot splash screen and reboots. Next time I boot in Safe mode and the reboot hangs while loading the agp440.sys driver (after loading a long list of other drivers), waits for a few seconds and then reboots. I find instructions at Microsoft Support that tell me to go into recovery console and disable the agp service, however this is where my real problems begin.

I use my WinXP CD to get into the Recovery Console. I have to install a FastTrack driver as part of the boot from the CD (I have Promise FastTrack RAID on my Gigabyte 8IHXP mother board). This is no problem as I can get the driver from Gigabyte (I've also updated the bios to the latest version). I finally get to the Recovery Console and Windows XP does not read my NTFS partition. CHKDSK is giving me an "unrecoverable error" and DISKPART is showing me that my parition is of unknown type. Also writing any files gives me an "access denied" error.

I don't believe that my drive(s) are toast because booting in safe mode shows WinXP loading a bunch of drivers from my partition before hanging on agp440.sys. At this point I'm thinking that the recovery console is just not seeing my partition, and I can't figure out why. Any help would be deeply appreciated.

 

Does listsvc give results?

Have you tried running fixboot from the recovery console? If so, how about fixmbr?

And FWIW, if things seem to blow up on agp440.sys then it's very possibly loading that but going out to lunch on what ever should be loaded next.

 

Thanks Newt,

Listsvc does not give me anything and fixboot and fixmbr just error out. I think for whatever reason the recovery console is just not loading my RAID driver correctly and is not able to recognize my partition. At this point what I would like to do is load the drivers one at a time from a safe mode boot. Any ideas? And thanks for your help.

 

I'm going to move this thread to the hardware section. Sounds like the issue is either the Fasttrack RAID or some combination of Fasttrack/XP/Mobo.

I agree that your drives are probably fine but given the hardware & firmware mix you are running, I don't have a clue what to suggest from here.

 

I'm posting back here because I've made some headway since my original post and wanted to share in case anyone has a similar problem.

I can at least now read from (but not write to) my NTFS partition on my RAID drive. I installed Red Hat Linux 8.0 to some unpartioned space at the end of my RAID drive (this was only possible after finding out that the TX2000 Linux Raid drivers from Promise worked with my 20276 Fasttrack device). Then I installed the Linux NTFS kernel driver for my specific linux kernel (available from linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net). After that I can now read the NTFS partition, recovery my data and archive it on my Linux partion or any of my other networked PCs. The Linux NTFS only supports write access experimentally, so I will wait to remove or repair the possibly offending agp440.sys driver until after my data is recovered. I will post back here if I am successful.

 

Hi Haggisagogo:

You said: "I can get the driver from Gigabyte "

I'm wondering if you actually got the Raid driver, copied onto a floppy and pressed F6 when loading XP from the CD. It asks you to press F6 if you want to load other hardware drivers almost immediately when it starts loading.

You must force Windows to use your Mfg's RAID driver instead of the native one it wants to load.

On this RAID machine, Windows XP CD load of recovery console will not recognize my RAID boot drive unless I F6 it and load my MFG's RAID drivers when prompted.

The prompt comes sometime after the F6 press and will not appear unless you press F6 at the appropriate time.

Good luck, please post when you find your solution.

Martin

 

chkdsk /f/r

 

thanks martinr121,

yes I have loaded my windows xp raid driver using f6 when i boot the winxp recovery console. without that driver the recovery console told me that it could not see any disk drive and would not load. with those drivers the recovery console sees my drive and drops me at the c: prompt, but all disk commands (chkdsk, fixmbr, etc.) tell me i have an unusable partition. I built the computer myself so I know I have an NTFS partition. As as previously stated I do not have a problem reading the partition from a Linux install on the same drive.

Im just writing back to tell of a catch-22 I have now. There are several linux drivers for ntfs. One, called captive-ntfs, has full write support for ntfs, but does not support raid. Another has very limited write support, it can only write over an existing file with one of the same length, however this may help me replace a potentially corrupt apg440.sys file. However, this support is only available for Linux kernels above 2.5.11. I'm running a 2.4.18 kernel and cannot upgrade it because it is the latest kernel that my Promise Raid drivers for linux supports. I'm going to try to write over the agp440.sys file using drivers for my current kernel even although I've been told it has a high probability of destroying my partition. But you know what, I can't use my NTFS partition now anyway. I'll write back to tell of the results.

 

Before you do something with a high probability of destroying the partition, have you tried to install XP over itself?

When booting from CD don't select repair, select install, F8 and enter your product ID. Windows, if you have loaded those drivers and the repair console can see "C ", the install program will ask if you want to do a new install or repair. Maybe just a chance that this will work, but if you can select repair, maybe, just maybe........

Again, good luck.

Martin

 

This is going to be my last post in this thread. Thanks everyone for their support, I really appreciate complete strangers trying to help me out. I will also try to give back to this forum in the future.

Due to the catch-22 situation mentioned in my previous post I could not get Linux to remove or repair my Windows XP NTFS partition. I tried installing Windows XP into that partition and that did not work, neither did trying to remove and reformat the NTFS partition during a Win XP install. I had to remove the NTFS partion under Linux and then reinstall Windows XP in a new NTFS partions. Nothing was lost as I had copies of my applications and my data was backed up, only some time. I've done a little more research into this and the problem could be that there was some corrupt data in the first sector of the NTFS partition. As a result the Recovery Console could not even identify the partion as NTFS. But this is just guessing on my part. I now have my WinXP partition up and running and I'm regularly backing up my data on a network drive.