[vox-tech] rescuing winxp?

[Ken Bloom]

On Sun, Sep 26, 2004 at 02:19:02AM -0400, Peter Jay Salzman wrote:
> On Sat 25 Sep 04, 10:59 PM, Ken Bloom <kabloom at ucdavis.edu> said:
> > 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?
> 
> Yeah -- it worked.
> 
> I'm guessing that the Norton something-or-other (ghost?  whatever
> that is) wanted to boot into a DOS environment.  So it created a
> small DOS partition, marked it bootable and intended to install DOS,
> but for whatever reason, it didn't complete the task.  That's just
> my guess.
> 
> In any event, changing the bootable flag to the C drive (and
> removing it from the small strange FAT partition) worked
> beautifully.
> 
> If my guess is right, I would be a little ... miffed that a piece of
> software would have the audacity to touch my partition.  My friend
> was ready to reformat his drives.

Considering that the whole point of Norton Ghost is to image
partitions, (save and restore partitions), it most certainly *should*
have the audacity to touch your partitions. Of course, if it was some
other Norton program entirely, then you might have a point (or you
might not).

--Ken Bloom
-- 
I usually have a GPG digital signature included as an attachment.
See http://www.gnupg.org/ for info about these digital signatures.
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