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XP reinstall major problems black screen

Discussion in 'Windows XP' started by nigelallen, 2009/04/13.

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  1. 2009/04/18
    nigelallen

    nigelallen Inactive Thread Starter

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    Thanks again for your response - as far as I'm concerned we've got nothing to lose by trying them - will give them a go and see what happens eh ?

    Thanks

    N
     
    nigelallen,
    #21
  2. 2009/04/19
    nigelallen

    nigelallen Inactive Thread Starter

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    JP Chris

    Hi

    An up-date for you - on the off-chance that you have not lost interest in this apparently lost cause?

    I followed your advice and installed Spybot etc. on the uninfected PC hooked up the infectected HD as a slave and ran the anti-virus programmes. Surprise surprise more viruses were identified.

    After deleteing them all I plugged the HD back in its original PC and tried rebooting - no change!

    As a last and final option I hooked the HD up as a slave again and reformatted the drive.

    Here's where I think I have killed it????

    I placed the HD back in its original PC, changed the bios to boot from CD and tried to boot from the disk. The disk is recognised, however, it now comes up with 2 messages reading 'BOOTMGR is missing' and the other one I get when I try to boot into safemode is 'INF.txtsetup.sif file is either missing or corrupt'.

    Have I now well and truly killed the PC??

    What started out as a favour to a friend has created hours of work, typical.

    On the other hand I have learnt so much and much appreciate yours and others help along the way.

    Any ideas would be gratefully received. If I can't resolve this can you suggest my next best option e.g. New HD and try disk or try different Boot disk if possible?

    Not sure if I've lost something during reformatting? I know I lose all personal data etc. but don't know enough about other files needed to run PC?

    Thanks JP Chris

    N
     
    nigelallen,
    #22


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  4. 2009/04/19
    jpChris

    jpChris Inactive

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    Hi Nigel,

    When you say you've tried to boot from the disk, did you see a prompt "Press any key to boot from CD" message "? It's usually at the bottom (I think) of the screen after the POST (Power On Self Test)(The computer checks itself when it loads/boots up).

    Some monitors take a few seconds to warm up. And after the POST beep, you may be past that screen.

    Reboot the computer and after the beep, repeatedly press the space bar.

    And, when you plugged the drive back into the original computer, you did change the jumper back, right?
     
    jpChris,
    #23
  5. 2009/04/19
    Christer

    Christer Geek Member Staff

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    Hi Nigel!

    In your situation, what I would do is to "nuke" the hard disk. By "nuke" I mean remove all partitions. If you do that, everything will be removed and there is no possibility to go back. The good thing is that the fresh installation will be from square one. To do what I suggest (the first two steps on your computer):

    Get a Windows 98SE boot disk. It can be downloaded here. Put a floppy in the drive and run the downloaded file to create the boot disk.

    Download DELPART, extract the file and add it to the floppy.

    Start the computer (the bad one) from the floppy. To do that, in BIOS set the boot order to Floppy>CD>HDD or CD>Floppy>HDD. (The important thing is that it boots from the HDD last.)

    It will propbably complain that there is no FAT32 partition but ignore that. When the computer has been started, at the A:\ prompt type in: "delpart" (without the " ") and hit enter.

    Now DELPART will run and list the partitions on the hard disk. As I understand it, there is only one hard disk. If there are two, e.g. a backup drive, the second one should be physically disconnected. (That prevents "nuking" the wrong hard disk.)

    Follow the prompts to delete the partition, save and exit. Remove the floppy and put the Windows XP CD in the tray. Hit "ctrl-alt-del" to restart. The computer will now boot from the CD. Follow the prompts to create a new partition, format it NTFS (full format) and continue with the installation.

    Christer

    By the way, don't forget to set the jumper back to its original position. Either Master or Cable Select can be used. With CS, the position on the cable will decide the mode => on the end connector = Master, on the middle connector = Slave.
     
    Christer,
    #24
  6. 2009/04/19
    nigelallen

    nigelallen Inactive Thread Starter

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    Hi JPChris

    Yes I replaced the jumper to its original position, check. I do get a prompt "Press any key to boot from CD" message and then the "BOOTMGR" is missing? Have tried the spacebar as per your suggestion but nothing! Thanks for getting back to me again - I'll give anything a go so please keep the suggestions coming ;-)

    Christer - many thanks for your input also - again I'll give it a go and keep you posted on the results.

    Thanks everyone for all your help.

    N
     
    nigelallen,
    #25
  7. 2009/04/21
    nigelallen

    nigelallen Inactive Thread Starter

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    Hi all

    Finally, finally got a nice clean install. In the end I 'nuked' the HD (many thanks Christer), must have had some stray files or something - I started with a clean HD, changed the bios to boot from CD and hey presto the installation was successful.

    Thanks to you guys, my friend now thinks I'm an expert - little does he know!

    Seriously though, I have learnt a lot about the PC environment and it is all thanks to the people who take the time to respond to people like me. Your advice has been excellent and for that I am most grateful and a special thanks to JPChris for his sustained patience and advice.

    Enough of my 'Oscar' speech for now anyway.

    Thanks again to one and all.

    N
     
    nigelallen,
    #26
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