obtain clean shutdown out of XP MS OOBE?

[VirtualLarry]

New laptop, wanted to Ghost existing install, didn't manage to get into BIOS to switch boot order before first boot, so MS OOBE started up, and now I get to the welcome screen with "Welcome to Microsoft Windows", on a blue screen, with a little question mark in the lower-right hand corner.

I can get a CMD window with Shift-F10, and run a "shutdown -f"... but it doesn't take effect.

I can hold the power button for ~5 seconds, and force a hard shutdown of the laptop, but it leave the NTFS logfile in an unclean state. I already did a Ghost, and it warns about this, but allows one to continue. I would prefer, if at all possible, to in fact do a Ghost of a clean NTFS volume.

I've already tried booting off of an XP Pro SP2 CD, to Recovery Console, and running a CHKDSK - there is no "/f" option, only /p and /r, tried both of those. Seemed to indicate finding issues, but not repairing them.

Is there no way to cleanly break out of the OOBE? Help! 😛

 

[stash]

Can you run tasklist from the command line and find the oobe process? Then use taskkill to kill it.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Good point. I can access files stored on my USB key from the CMD window, so I should load it up with some SysInternals utils. I hadn't thought of that before. I'm going to turn it into a mega-DOS-boot-disk.

On the down side, this brand-new laptop's touchpad seems to be flaky, and locks up DOS programs like Ghost and Partition Commander, and I managed to get Memtest86+ to input a "c" key, via just moving the touchpad around. Very strange. Seems to be find inside WinXP Home though. :|

Wow, I just copied TASKLIST and TASKKILL to the USB drive, and when I run TASKLIST, I get "ERROR: Critical error." MS OOBE rules over all, I guess.

Well, I found out the wrong way to bypass the MS OOBE... start "EXPLORER.EXE" from the CMD window.. starts the remainder-install of the pre-installed software.. without finishing up the OOBE stuff. Oops. That's what I was trying to avoid, actually. 🙁

Some program named "oca_mrk" ran and gave some sort of "Run-time error '-2147217398 (8004100a)': Automation error". Looks like I borked up the OOBE something good. :|

Ok, looks like that actually did it. I was able to right-click and get to Task Manager, and managed to kill off MS OOBE, and then it killed Explorer.exe, and gave some sort of Windows Setup error, and then restarted the machine ... with a clean NTFS filesystem! Hooray, success at last, I think. I just hope that if I Ghost at this point, it is possible to still properly run the OOBE. IOW, hopefully I didn't neuter the proper setup crap.

Edit: I discovered a much simpler and hassle-free way to end the OOBE, temporarily - go through it, until you get to the EULA screen, and then simple say "No" - the 'next' button changed into a 'shutdown' button, viola, clean FS shutdown. 🙂

(Except, not totally clean - Partition Commander gives an error about an unclean FS when attempting to resize the NTFS partition, whereas Ghost 2003 does not give an error about a dirty NTFS logfile. So perhaps there is some actual FS damage, but I couldn't get a CHKDSK /F to work - /F doesn't even exist in the Recovery Console version of CHKDSK.)

So I blew away the partition, created a new, smaller 10GB NTFS partition, and am Ghosting the contents back.