I recently installed Knoppix on my mom's machine, it went well. Installed LILO, pretty good. XP still booted at this point, but when I changed XP to the default OS that LILO booted, XP refused to boot properly. It brings up the normal XP Home boot screen with the green scrolling bar, but then it'll bring up a blue screen with white text. I can't see what this says because it'll reboot right after that. I tryed doing FIXMBR and FIXBOOT from the XP CD in the recovery console, but no luck... LILO is gone now (because of FIXMBR) but XP still won't boot. It still gives the white on blue screen, then reboots. I've tried "use last known good settings" and safe mode, but nothing... I'd like to get this fixed as soon as possible because this is my mom's machine, and if i don't, i'll be in deep poo. I'd prefer not to reinstall XP too.
WinXP Home refuses to boot properly
- Thread starter satoshi
- Start date
My friend told me to do that. That's where you go into install and choose the partition, right? Well, he says it's there on his XP Pro CD, but I can't find it on my XP Home CD.
Boot from the cd. It will load the setup files. Iwill then show your current partitions. Choose the on e with XP on it and hit "r" for repair. Its just like when you first installed it.
I even tried copying over ntldr and ntdetect.com as it said in another topic that seems somewhat like my problem, but alas... nothing...
I'm sure you could... but I can't see it. I tried hitting Pause too, it worked once when i needed way back when, but it didn't help there either...
edit: there should be here/now (it didn't work here/now either)
edit: there should be here/now (it didn't work here/now either)
Just curious but at the point after it loads the setup files and you choose the partiton, shouldn't you click "Install"? Then it will find the earlier install and ask if you want to repair instead. I believe that is the way you should do it.
Yes-forgot that. After you select the partition select install and it will tell you that an instance of XP is already on the partition at which point it will ask what you want to do. Then hit "r"
Um, no, it said "there is already an operating system on this partition, installing here could mess up that operating system, continue?" I hit yes. "It seems that there is a windows installation using c:\windows already, what do you want to do? 1. Delete windows folder 2.Don't delete folder 3.I forget (but it wasn't repair)."
I'm not sure what you are doing differently but I just did a "dry run" with my XP disk on the wife's system (didn't think I'd mess with mine did you?) and it worked as we mentioned. After selecting the partition it states that there is already an OS present and what would I like to do. One of the options is to repair the installation. I didn't write all things down as the wife was standing over my shoulder making me wish I hadn't started but it did get to that option. 
You'll have to forgive me a bit. I never deal with the home version of XP but this should all apply anyway:
You can do a "repair" of the current installation. This will swap out all the files in your windows\system32 folder with ones from your original CD but leave all subfolders alone which preserves your registry, start menu etc. You'll have to re-run all service packs and critical hotfixes and in rare circumstances it can cause some problems especially if some other software like CD-burning software has changed a system32 file.
It would be nicer to actually find out what that bugcheck is and just fix it. If you can get the bugcheck info I can tell you what to do.
To get a bugcheck you can do one of several things:
1. Do a parallel install...just do a full install from CD but specify a folder other that C:\windows (Yes it's safe to do in the same partition). Boot to the new install, open the system hive from the damaged registry (C:\windows\system32\config\system) with regedit and change HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CrashControl\AutoReboot to 0x00000000 then reboot to the damaged install and wait for the bluescreen. Post the first 4 lines here in the forum.
2. Use the recovery console (boot with a 2000 CD/XP Pro CD to get there) and grab the most recent file from c:\windows\minidump. The file is 64k and should fit on a floppy so you can email it. Private message me for the address.
Something you might want to check: boot to a recovery console and see if you have write permissions to the root of C: ...just rename a file and then back again to check. This is a pretty common bugcheck that occurs at the portion of boot you are describing. If you were able to successfully copy over ntldr and ntdetect this probably won't apply though.
Just a word of warning to all you folks out there:
Don't use FIXMBR or Fdisk /mbr casually on a damaged drive. If you are missing the end of sector marker on sector 0 and you run one of these you'll just notice a lot of disk activity as it zero's out every byte on your drive! It takes rare circumstances but it can happen.
Satoshi, If you have a free Microsoft support incident that came with your OS now would be a good time to use it. I'm not sure what the hold times are like for the home users but once you get through they'll stay with you until it's fixed.
If you can get to that stop code or get me a copy of a memory dump I can get you working. If not, the repair mentioned above is a reasonably good route to take...if it works in "home".
Smilin
You can do a "repair" of the current installation. This will swap out all the files in your windows\system32 folder with ones from your original CD but leave all subfolders alone which preserves your registry, start menu etc. You'll have to re-run all service packs and critical hotfixes and in rare circumstances it can cause some problems especially if some other software like CD-burning software has changed a system32 file.
It would be nicer to actually find out what that bugcheck is and just fix it. If you can get the bugcheck info I can tell you what to do.
To get a bugcheck you can do one of several things:
1. Do a parallel install...just do a full install from CD but specify a folder other that C:\windows (Yes it's safe to do in the same partition). Boot to the new install, open the system hive from the damaged registry (C:\windows\system32\config\system) with regedit and change HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CrashControl\AutoReboot to 0x00000000 then reboot to the damaged install and wait for the bluescreen. Post the first 4 lines here in the forum.
2. Use the recovery console (boot with a 2000 CD/XP Pro CD to get there) and grab the most recent file from c:\windows\minidump. The file is 64k and should fit on a floppy so you can email it. Private message me for the address.
Something you might want to check: boot to a recovery console and see if you have write permissions to the root of C: ...just rename a file and then back again to check. This is a pretty common bugcheck that occurs at the portion of boot you are describing. If you were able to successfully copy over ntldr and ntdetect this probably won't apply though.
Just a word of warning to all you folks out there:
Don't use FIXMBR or Fdisk /mbr casually on a damaged drive. If you are missing the end of sector marker on sector 0 and you run one of these you'll just notice a lot of disk activity as it zero's out every byte on your drive! It takes rare circumstances but it can happen.
Satoshi, If you have a free Microsoft support incident that came with your OS now would be a good time to use it. I'm not sure what the hold times are like for the home users but once you get through they'll stay with you until it's fixed.
If you can get to that stop code or get me a copy of a memory dump I can get you working. If not, the repair mentioned above is a reasonably good route to take...if it works in "home".
Smilin
I'll check again about the repair thing on the CD, but I've got something interesting to share... My brother needed to use the computer for homework and wanted me to get off of it (I was running Knoppix from CD, that's how I posted at this forum). So, I reboot out of Knoppix and let Windows do it's thing. He walks out of the room the first time it does the loading screen. So I let it do it again to see if he sees it again. He doesn't... I let it run through a third time, and i see the pick a user screen. I guess the third time's a charm. I just stared at the monitor in disbelief for a good minute. It booted up! So, I let him do his homework, but I didn't get a chance to try rebooting again to see what would happen, it was late. So, today, after school, I boot it up again, and it takes 3 times to get it right again. So, I don't think installing a parallel installation of XP will be needed, but there must now be something I can do within Windows to fix it. Like I said, though, I'll check the CD again. However, I'm pretty sure it didn't say repair once (except for the recovery console), but I'll check again, most likely won't be tonight, but I'll look at it tomorrow.
OK, but will I be able to get back in if I turn off auto reboot? Will I just have to manually reboot it twice? The computer HAS to be useable. My brother has homework online and my mom needs to use it for her e-mail.
Whoa... This gets more confusing every day... My mom turned the computer on to view show times for a movie at the local AMC, and I sat down to skip past the "Windows did not shut down properly, what would you like to do?" screens. Afterall, it's the nice thing to do on her birthday. Anyway, I sat there, and watched it boot.. Then it went to the black screen between the boot screen and the login screen (or error). The black screen is about 5-8 seconds when it errors, but it's only like 2-3 seconds when the login screen pops up. Well... the black screen was about 2-3 seconds... It booted perfectly on the first try. I dunno why or how, I've been at school all day and havn't been able to mess around with anything yet. I'm gonna try rebooting it later to see if it does this again.. This is truly weird and confusing....
OK, after getting back from the movie, and turning the computer on so my brother could do homework.. It errored 4 or 5 times (I say 4 or 5 because I'm not sure whether counted a fifth one, or only anticipated it and made myself think it errored a 5th time). I havn't tried stopping the auto-reboot thing yet, like I said, the computer HAS to be useable. But, however, I did manage to catch a few words of the message. Usually I would see "... physical..." on the second from last line near the right. This time (from a different angle) I managed to see "...technical support...". I'm not sure when I'll have time to work on it, but the first thing I'm gonna do is install a "parallel" installation of XP, as suggested by smilin. I'll post again when more complications arise or when I can start. Thanks for the suggestions.
Got a digicam that you could take a quick snapshot of the screen? Might take a few tries but it seems you will have plenty of opportunity for it.
satoshi, if you can get a copy of a memory dump from the minidump folder on your damaged installation I'll take a look at it for you.
what kind of information can you tell from a Windows memory dump?
I mean, how do you read it.
Thanks
I mean, how do you read it.
Thanks
You run it through a debugger. It can tell you what driver/service is crashing and what driver/service is causing that one to crash. Sometimes it can tell you about a hardware problem if, for instance, some data is getting pulled off the stack and placed in a register but during the move some bits get flipped in the transfer or something. It helps to have some monstrous knowledge base backing up the debugger though You can sometimes just paste a big chunk of hex into the search and see what pops up.
You can sometimes just paste a big chunk of hex into the search and see what pops up.Vtqanh, here's a Public Debugger for you. You'll definately want to link to the symbols server once you get it up and running. It's not as powerful a resource as the internal ones that big software companies have (no kbase either) but it's not too shabby. Just don't ask for any help using it
I'm only now learning this stuff and quite a bit of it still seems like black magic to me.TRENDING THREADS
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