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Weird XP problem, Winternals doesn't find OS, crashes when booting

T

TechBoyJK

Lifer
Hi Guys,

My friend brought his PC over and asked for help. It wouldn't boot. I replaced the power supply, and got it to post, etc. The CD-Rom drives won't open though, which makes me think when he PS blew it damaged them.

I hooked up a new cd-rom and it works fine. I hooked up a new hard drive and it works fine, i installed XP to see if it works, and it loaded up and i was able to run prime95 for more than 24 hours. I also ran memtest on it for 24 hours.

He's got some data on the original drive he wants to recover. if I boot into the machine using Winternals, it does not recognize any windows installation. if I boot the the hard drive, it gets halfway through laoding windows then crashes. It just locks up hard.

I tried getting a recovery console so I could run a repair, no luck.

During the Windows installation phase, it does recognize an NTFS installation with a windows folder. It asks if I just want to install it leaving the file system intact or format and do a fresh install.

if I leave the file system intact, will that delete any files in the my documents folder? it shouldnt, right?
 
What is Winternals? Is that some sort of WinPE-based OS or something?

I would pull out the HD, and slave it to another computer, and copy off the files that you need to some sort of backup media, wipe the drive, and reinstall fresh.
 
If you can get a new installation going then it shouldn't mess with anything in the my docs area. I would still do a ghost of it in case.
 
It's all good guys, I found a utility in winternals to see the filesystem. I was able to back everything up to USB and do a fresh install.
 
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