- May 19, 2011
- 17,707
- 9,569
- 136
My Windows XP troubleshooting knowledge is rusty, there's no question about that!
A customer wanted me to take a look at her late husband's Win7 PC and specifically 'Windows XP Mode' on it to find out whether there was a piece of music software in there. First of all she didn't know what the login password was (I'm trying to remember how I used to hack XP passwords... I have a Win7 ntpasswd disc here, maybe I used that?), I ended up guessing it ('password'), then when I logged in I noticed a Word 97 icon. I fired that up (inspired by a touch of nostalgia), at which point XP promptly crashed, rebooted and said that the SYSTEM registry file was corrupted. I tried getting XP to boot from 'last known good configuration' which didn't make any difference.
I figured that I could mount the virtual file systems on a newer version of Windows. There are two, one in Program Files\XP Mode and the other in %localappdata%\Microsoft\Windows Virtual PC. I could only mount the former as read-only so that wouldn't help (not a file system permissions issue) and I couldn't mount the latter, Windows complained that the latter was part of a broken chain of images. The one in %localappdata% is easily big enough to house an entire OS image though. Puzzling.
I then noticed that XP Mode presents a fully-fledged BIOS which I accessed ('press DEL to enter setup'), changed the default boot device to a CD, got out my trusty WinXP Pro SP3 boot CD, booted into setup (the DOS-based setup threw me for a loop, while it was starting I couldn't remember for the life of me how to get a command prompt there) then recovery console ('Press R for recovery console'), then the non-standard 'chkdsk /p' fixed the filesystem, rebooted, voila, XP Mode works again.
I know that this is likely to be obsolete knowledge, but just like when I first thought about that when a person dies, so many of their photo collection becomes value-less (e.g. a customer was saying yesterday how they don't recognise tonnes of people from their parents' photo collection but feel obligated to keep it anyway), technical knowledge regarding bygone tech seems likely to suffer a similar fate, but it was really useful knowledge to me once!
A customer wanted me to take a look at her late husband's Win7 PC and specifically 'Windows XP Mode' on it to find out whether there was a piece of music software in there. First of all she didn't know what the login password was (I'm trying to remember how I used to hack XP passwords... I have a Win7 ntpasswd disc here, maybe I used that?), I ended up guessing it ('password'), then when I logged in I noticed a Word 97 icon. I fired that up (inspired by a touch of nostalgia), at which point XP promptly crashed, rebooted and said that the SYSTEM registry file was corrupted. I tried getting XP to boot from 'last known good configuration' which didn't make any difference.
I figured that I could mount the virtual file systems on a newer version of Windows. There are two, one in Program Files\XP Mode and the other in %localappdata%\Microsoft\Windows Virtual PC. I could only mount the former as read-only so that wouldn't help (not a file system permissions issue) and I couldn't mount the latter, Windows complained that the latter was part of a broken chain of images. The one in %localappdata% is easily big enough to house an entire OS image though. Puzzling.
I then noticed that XP Mode presents a fully-fledged BIOS which I accessed ('press DEL to enter setup'), changed the default boot device to a CD, got out my trusty WinXP Pro SP3 boot CD, booted into setup (the DOS-based setup threw me for a loop, while it was starting I couldn't remember for the life of me how to get a command prompt there) then recovery console ('Press R for recovery console'), then the non-standard 'chkdsk /p' fixed the filesystem, rebooted, voila, XP Mode works again.
I know that this is likely to be obsolete knowledge, but just like when I first thought about that when a person dies, so many of their photo collection becomes value-less (e.g. a customer was saying yesterday how they don't recognise tonnes of people from their parents' photo collection but feel obligated to keep it anyway), technical knowledge regarding bygone tech seems likely to suffer a similar fate, but it was really useful knowledge to me once!
Facebook
Twitter