[vox-tech] rescuing winxp?

[Jonathan Stickel]

I can tell you what NOT to do if you get winXP disk:  don't boot it and 
choose "system restore" or whatever the option is called.  It 
re-installs WinXP entirely over itself, erasing all those important 
updates, installed drivers, etc.  You might as well start from scratch!

I did this by mistake after dual-booting Fedora 2 on a friend's 
computer, and it wouldn't boot WinXP.  Turned out I just needed to 
change a BIOS option. :(

Jonathan


Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> A friend's XP system needs rescuing.  When it boots, a message comes up right
> away "No operating system found".  Since I use Linux, he asked me to help
> restore the system.
> 
> The first thing I did was mount the hard drive on my Linux box and I made a
> complete image of his C and D drives.  He's using NTFS.
> 
> I now have images of his entire hard drive, so now I'm trying to rescue the
> system.  I don't know much about Windows, so I'm a little lost, but I assume
> the problem is either:
> 
> 1. MBR got corrupted
>    * Could be a virus
>    * More likely, it has something to do with software he was installing at
>       the time.  He was trying to use Norton something-or-other which
>       wanted to be rebooted into DOS mode.  That's when things went south.
> 
> 2. Missing system files
>    * autoexec.bat, config.sys and msdos.sys are all empty
>    * maybe some other crucial file is missing.  I'm not familiar
>       with Windows.  I thought there should be something named
>       C:\command.com, but it appears to be missing.
> 
> 
> Did some Google searching.  Apparently, the Windows XP disk has a rescue
> console, and it sounds like it does exactly what I need: rewrite the MBR and
> install a few crucial system files.  Unfortunately, (fortunately?) I've never
> had the need for XP, and don't have it.  I really don't want to buy a copy,
> either.
> 
> Apparently, there's a DOS utility called SYS, and doing:
> 
>    SYS C:
> 
> is supposed to restore some crucial boot up files, but when I boot a DOS
> disk, it doesn't seem to know about the hard drive.  I take this to mean that
> DOS doesn't know how to access NTFS.
> 
> I'm still Googling, but I figured I'd throw this out in case someone here is
> knowledgable about this kind of thing.
> 
> Any ideas on how to rescue the MBR without a Windows XP disk?
> 
> Pete
>