Am I uckfayed? I used a windows XP Home CD

[OfficeLinebacker]

..and things don't look too good.

The problems arose when I was playing with overclocking and Folding as a service and th e machine kept rebooting as soon as I got into windows (even after I de-clocked it).

I lost the XP Pro CD so I figured I would try the Home CD I inherited from my aunt's old Gateway she was throwing out (bad Mobo). I did a fixboot and Now I get the NTLDR is missing message. Tried copying NTLDR and NTDETECT.com to the Crive. No go.

When I do a DIR on the drive in the recovery console I get weird characters. After I copied the files I got little happy faces and weird characters in the filenames.

I'm thinking if I install an OS on another HD I can salvage the files off there but I think it's days as a boot disk are done (unless I reformat). It's a Maxtor 250 gig, the one that was onsale at overstock.com last year.

 

[Mildlyamused]

First of all did you have the Maxtor 250gig drive partitioned or was it one large partition (unpartitioned)? Was the windows XP pro disc that you had have SP1 on it? SP2? No SP? If it didn't have a SP, did you install a service pack after installing the OS, did the registry edit, then repartition the 250GB drive so it's one large partition? Also did the windows XP home disc have SP1 on it?

The reason I ask of this "SP" (Service Pack) is because windows XP prior to SP1 does not support drives with 48bit LBA (drive sizes past 137GB). In order to support large drives, you need to either have a disc with SP1 on it or install windows XP on the drive (let it detect only the first 137GB), format and install then update to at least SP1, registry patch and either make the rest of the space as another partition or use a partitioning program to make the boot partition what ever the size of the drive is.

Doing a repair install with windows XP home shouldn't have caused that error and simply replaced the system with XP home because when you do a repair installation, it deletes the windows folder and starts over therfore not causing any problems. Looks like your problem is that fact you used an old windows XP home disc with out SP1 on a machine that clearly needed it.

 

[OfficeLinebacker]

Originally posted by: Mildlyamused
First of all did you have the Maxtor 250gig drive partitioned or was it one large partition (unpartitioned)? Was the windows XP pro disc that you had have SP1 on it? SP2? No SP? If it didn't have a SP, did you install a service pack after installing the OS, did the registry edit, then repartition the 250GB drive so it's one large partition? Also did the windows XP home disc have SP1 on it?

The reason I ask of this "SP" (Service Pack) is because windows XP prior to SP1 does not support drives with 48bit LBA (drive sizes past 137GB). In order to support large drives, you need to either have a disc with SP1 on it or install windows XP on the drive (let it detect only the first 137GB), format and install then update to at least SP1, registry patch and either make the rest of the space as another partition or use a partitioning program to make the boot partition what ever the size of the drive is.

Doing a repair install with windows XP home shouldn't have caused that error and simply replaced the system with XP home because when you do a repair installation, it deletes the windows folder and starts over therfore not causing any problems. Looks like your problem is that fact you used an old windows XP home disc with out SP1 on a machine that clearly needed it.

Great Answer.

it's a bit of a conundrum. It's been a while, so I *think* the original installation was SP1 but I can't be sure.

It was originally installed on a 30GB drive, then I used the software that came with the 250GB (called MaxBlast, basically copies everything over exactly). I don't remember if I had already installed SP2 yet at that point. I think so cos I coudl see thw whole drive in the OS.

I agree in that I think your analysis is correct. It's a fairly old XP Home CD.

First off is it legal to use someone else's XP Pro CD, and secondly is there copy protection on XP Pro CDs?

Actually my mom has a DVD that came with her new Toshiba laptop. I could try to use that, but it's iffy.

Any more advice is appreciated.

 

[tomt4535]

just as long as you still have your cd key, you should be able to use another disk with no problems.

 

[OfficeLinebacker]

Thanks tomt.

 

[Mildlyamused]

Originally posted by: OfficeLinebacker
...and secondly is there copy protection on XP Pro CDs?

No, but if you want to copy windows XP cds period, you have to actually copy it with out any copy protections switches/sub channel crap. I tried copying a windows XP CD by using alcohol 120% and told it it was a general protected CD (copys every bit to circumvent copy protection) and it made a bad cd. I finally figured it out that if you copy the cd as "normal cd" or use a program like nero's cd copy with nothing special that it will work fine, quite odd really...

Actually my mom has a DVD that came with her new Toshiba laptop. I could try to use that, but it's iffy.

Thats a horrible idea and wouldn't even consider it! That dvd that came with the laptop has all the proprietary crappy toshiba software on it but it's not like it matters anyway because it's physically impossible to do since it detects the machine prior to loading.

 

[OfficeLinebacker]

Originally posted by: Mildlyamused

Originally posted by: OfficeLinebacker
...and secondly is there copy protection on XP Pro CDs?

No, but if you want to copy windows XP cds period, you have to actually copy it with out any copy protections switches/sub channel crap. I tried copying a windows XP CD by using alcohol 120% and told it it was a general protected CD (copys every bit to circumvent copy protection) and it made a bad cd. I finally figured it out that if you copy the cd as "normal cd" or use a program like nero's cd copy with nothing special that it will work fine, quite odd really...

Actually my mom has a DVD that came with her new Toshiba laptop. I could try to use that, but it's iffy.

Thats a horrible idea and wouldn't even consider it! That dvd that came with the laptop has all the proprietary crappy toshiba software on it but it's not like it matters anyway because it's physically impossible to do since it detects the machine prior to loading.

Looks like I am now officially on a mission to find a copy of an XP Pro CD. The CD, not the license.

Thanks for your insight.