[vox-tech] rescuing winxp?

[Ken Bloom]

On Fri, Sep 24, 2004 at 01:31:17PM -0400, 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

What's up with this? Did changing the bootable flag work?

-- 
I usually have a GPG digital signature included as an attachment.
See http://www.gnupg.org/ for info about these digital signatures.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : http://ns1.livepenguin.com/pipermail/vox-tech/attachments/20040925/332b5a46/attachment.bin