XP Does Not Get Into Windows

Hello,
First of all, I would like to thank all of you in advance for any help you can provide. Thank you !!

The problem: a friend of mine has an HP Pavillion XT913 with XP Pro on it. Running normally until he came home last night, and it was stuck in Scandisk mode. He powered the system off/on, and now the HP logo window comes up, then the typical Win XP options: Safe Mode, Safe Mode with Networking, Last Good Known, and Normal Windows. No option works. When selecting any option, he gets about 40 lines of multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)/Windows/System32/drivers/ with a bunch of *.sys files at the end of each line. The system then goes into the Windows XP logo screen, starts loading (small blue bar scrolling), then the system reboots, and it's the same thing again. I tried F1 and selected other options from that menu (enable logging, debugging) all to no avail. Since he was away at the time, he's not sure what may have caused this. No new programs, software or hardware have been recently added. He's on Cable Modem, and does have some spy cleaning software, but that's about all I am aware of now.

Any suggestions? I've searched a bit on the forums and many of the posts provide help for errors once in Windows, but on this system, I can't even get into it, regardless of the mode I use to get in.

Again, your assistance is greatly thanked for in advance, and I look forward to seeing any replies !!!

Thank you
Paul
(cintoman)

 

Hi,
tried repairing Windows XP with repairing console :

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;314058
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/win_xp_rec.htm
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm


Regards

 

Hello,
Well I inserted my XP CD, selected (R) to go to the Recovery Console, and I got to the main screen:

Microsoft Windows(R) Recovery Console

The Recovery Console provides system repair and recovery functionality.
Type EXIT to quit the Recovery Console and restart the computer.

I then have just a c:\ prompt. I don't have the next part of it where it lists "C:\WINDOWS" or which installation I'd like to log on to as shown below:

1: C:\WINDOWS

Which Windows Installation would you like to log on to
(To cancel, press ENTER)?

Any suggestions?
Thank you again !!!

Paul

 

That's strange. The C:> prompt is useful, however. Suggest you type help <enter> at the prompt. If you get a list, you can type any one of the listed commands followed by a space and
/?
to see what it does.

Look around and, in any case, type
type boot.ini
to see what's there. If it's not found, type
attrib -h boot.ini and try again.

Do dir to see if the files
C:\NTDETECT.COM
C:\NTFS.SYS
C:\ntldr
are also present.

Try fixmbr and fixboot and, in any case, then type
exit to reboot (or ctrl-alt-del if exit doesn't work) and tap F8 repeatedly 'til you get a menu and choose safe mode.

Please let us know how it goes.

 

Hello again,
When typing boot.ini at the Recovery Console C:\ prompt, I get: The file cannot be opened. . I then tried the attrib command, and got the same error.

Doing a dir from the C:\ prompt brings up Directory of C:\, sits there for a while, then comes up with An error occurred during directory enumeration

I then typed fix mbr but got a big CAUTION: "This computer appears to have a non-standard or invalid master boot record. FIXMBR may damage you partition tables if you proceed. This could cause all the partitions on the current hard disk to become inaccessible. If you are not having problems accessing your drive, do not continue. Are you sure you want to write a new MBR? "

So I held off on doing that. I tried the fixboot, and a new bootsector was successfully written. I CTRL-ALT-DEL and now when booting normally (not from the CD, I'm getting NTLDR is missing Press any key to restart, and can't get any further now.

I can still get into the Recovery Console when booting off the CD, but I still only have the C:\ prompt and not the typical 1. C:\Windows selection.

Ruh-Roh (as Scooby Doo would say)...

Thank you again for your continued assistance !!!!
Paul

 

XP reinstall indicated.

Think that means the installation, XP Pro, is damaged beyong repair and will need removing by deleting the partition and remaking it (you can use the XP CD) followed by format and reinstall the OS. You'll need the original XP installation CD.

That must also explain why you didn't get the c:\windows prompt.

That's the easiest way to insure that the HDD itself is still intact, which is another consideration, but think it's less likely that that's the problem. If it is, you won't be able to do the installation.

If there's data to be recovered first, you might try installing the disk as slave in one of your computers to see if the data is still there and attempt recovery.

Addn: Reread thread and see this is an HP. If you don't have an original XP install CD, have found HP's recovery CDs satisfactory, but would first remove the present partition and remake and then format it with any Windows install CD you have, or even with a windows 98 boot floppy if that's all you have. Or you may be able to do it with the disk as slave, as suggested above. Important in case the damage has been done by malware (worm, virus,etc.).

 

Hello again,
Well, the fight does not go well.... I put this drive on another system as a slave, and booted up the system. It found the drive, but the only thing on it were 2 files on the root directory: NTLDR and NTDETECT. These were files that I had copied over when I was getting the NTLDR not found error when booting up on the original system.

So, I was going to reinstall WinXP. Going thru the setup, it finds the following partition:

28624 MB Disk 0 at Id 0 on bus 0 on atapi [MBR]
C: Partition1 [FAT] 28623 MB (6MB free)

So, it looks like it finds the partition. But before I delete it and create a new one, I just want to be certain that there's no way to retrieve any data from it. Is this true?

Thank you again for your help.
Paul

 

It is possble that some data recovery software can read the drive surface and retrieve some of your old stuff. Not real likely but possible. The software isn't cheap though.

It is possible that a professional data recovery company could get back some or all of the data. They disassemble the drive and use specialized equipment to read what they find on the individual platters.

No guarantees they will find anything usable and a guarantee that it will be expensive so only worth while if you have some really critical stuff on there.

Otherwise, for us normal mortals, I'd say your drive contents is toast.

 

Hello,
In response to Newt's post, I'm tending to agree that the drive is toasted. I've gone as far as downloading Knoppix, burning the image to a CD, booting off the CD, and seeing if I could see and/or retrieve any data. No luck. I'm currently running Active Partition Recovery, but it doesn't look good either. As I'm sure everyone would agree, the info my friend had on the drive is really important, but not important enough to have to pay a couple grand to retrieve it.

Any final thoughts as to what may have caused this? As I mentioned, his girlfriend was on the system last and was probably surfing the web or checking e-mail. I'm thinking it might have been a worm.

Thanks to all who posted the very helpful suggestions. I wish the end result was better, but nevertheless, everyone's help was immensely appreciated !!!!

Thanks again,
Paul
(Cintoman)

 

You can get opinions all over the map, but would personally not make a system partition over about 10GB so it can be easily imaged. I use Ghost2003. That's provided the user is sophisticated enough to place data and third party programs on a second partition. Believe FAT32 is all an individual's PC needs, as HP apparently does also.

Have seen malware do similarly and agree it's likely a worm or similar, but you'll find out for sure if the HDD is OK when you try putting the OS back on.

 

Thanks again for the heads up sparrow. Installing XP right now !!

Thanks,
Paul
(cintoman)

 

On that spare hard drive, I wiped the partition and windows xp seems to be installing okay at the moment. Once I get it up and running, I'm gonna reconnect the hard drive with all my stuff and see if I can at least pull the stuff I'm after off of it.

It the file system is damaged, would a chkdsk /r build it back to where it is recognized??

 

chkdsk /f makes the disk readable to the OS and would do that first. It doesn't recover anything that's lost. chkdsk /r will find and mark bad sectors, also not recovering anything lost.

 

Well, I got the spare hard drive up and got windows xp installed with no problems. Then I was able to get the main hard drive connected and recognized (after messing with the jumpers). At first, no prob. Then I started copying files from the main to the spare, and it rebooted.

I'm bringing up Norton Ghost to clone the main and then reformat/partition the main drive. I too, now believe it's an HDD problem. I hope I'm right. What do you think???

I really do appreciate your help.

 

Look for diagnostic progs on the mfgr's web page. Running diagnostics should tell you if the disk is toast or not.

 

The fastest path to salvation - backup the drive, reformat it and reload windows xp. Its always a good idea to make 2 partititions - one for OS and other for data. If the OS partition gets hosed, you loose a little (your programs, patches, customisations etc.) but your data is safe (more or less).

If you want to tread the long path - then keep on searching.