[vox-tech] rescuing winxp? (resolved)

[Peter Jay Salzman]

OK.  Just fixed it.

Booted Knoppix.

Used cfdisk.  Cfdisk said something about partitions "out of order on disk"
   and exited.

Used fdisk.

Noticed that there were two NTFS partitions, hda1 and hda3 which I assumed
   were C: and D:.

hda 2 and 4 (where were listed between hda1 and hda3.  Never saw that
   before) were some wierd W95 LBA partitions.  Never saw that before.  One
   said "hidden FAT".  Strange.

Noticed that hda4 was bootable.  Seemed strange to me.  My gut feeling is
   that hda1 should be bootable.

So I made hda1 bootable.

Rebooted.  System now says "invalid partition table".  I feel my heart in my
   stomach.

I remember Rick Moen's post about the bootable flag from a few years ago.

Rebooted Knoppix.  Ran fdisk.

I toggled the bootable flag on hda4 so now hda1 is the ONLY partition with
   the bootable flag turned on.  Previously, both hda1 and hda4 had the
   bootable flag.

Rebooted.

Worked.


Conclusion:

The Norton something-or-other marked some wierd FAT partition with the
bootable flag.  The fix was to make the C drive bootable (and to make sure
that only one partition had the bootable flag).

Pete




On Fri 24 Sep 04,  1:31 PM, Peter Jay Salzman <p at dirac.org> said:
> 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
> 
> -- 
> Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. -- Albert Einstein
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-- 
Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. -- Albert Einstein
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