Paul Komski
05-10-2003, 10:05 PM
Whether by accident or by design, it is possible to have made a WinXP (or W2K) partiton inaccessible by the system no longer recognising either where it is now or what drive letter is assigned to it.
The following are all examples of things that can cause this (there are bound to be others too):-
Installing an earlier version of Windows after the later version is happily installed.
Reinstating partition image files but not to their original positions.
Copying a whole system partition to another part of the drive in order to move its position or create a backup.
Changing the files (notably the 3 bootloaders – boot.ini, ntldr and netdetect.com) in the root of the C partition or by changing the format of C from FAT to NTFS; this means that DOS-based apps can no longer either read or write to it.
Splitting, merging, deleting, converting (esp from FAT to NTFS) or hiding partitions on the drive.
Marking a partition, other than C, as active can also cause related and more intricate problems.
Forcing a changed drive letter for any system partition.
As long as the partition containing the previously working os is not written over or obliterated by formatting, etc then I have always, eventually, been able to get it functioning normally again. Sometimes this has taken a lot of "juggling".
In essence this often means doing a repair installation of XP and for which it is essential that you have the installation CD and know the product key. Remember to enable the BIOS to be able to boot from the CD. It is also recommended to always attempt these repairs by booting to the CD and not running it from within windows; the prompts are harder to read but less confusing. Bad luck if you only have a restore disk or restore files on the HDD; you may then be into the road of using recovery software.
However, the above manouvres can trick the system into not displaying the installation you want to repair and appear to leave you stumped. What may seem strange is that you will usually be able to logon to the problem partition to do a “repair” using the recovery console, but when you try to actually repair the whole installation it does not show up in the list.
I would advise that all the following steps be taken. If you have real important data then backup the whole drive by slaving it to another pc and make an image of it there before starting. As a minimum, backup just the important partitions using something like Norton's Ghost or PQ's DriveImage or DriveCopy.
First make a copy of the three main boot loaders from C onto a floppy. It is wise to have a copy of these in any case. You may have to edit just the boot.ini file manually, but generally the original one will work fine and usually be able to get you back into your system.
Recommend removing any slave drive temporarily so that drive lettering is less likely to get confusing.
With or without this floppy, you may still get a “hal.dll is missing or corrupt” message after attempting to boot.
Now if you can’t get into any OS you will need Partition Magic (or similar) on floppies. Start it and ensure that C: (assuming this is the normal boot partition) is the only active partition. Unhide any hidden partitions (utilities or os installations may have done this hiding during their various processes). Finally I would suggest converting all partitions from NTFS to FAT32 using PM. You can convert them back afterwards when you are ready. Hopefully no file encryption is in place or this wont work. The ideas behing this are to make everything as visible as possible to everything. As a minimum convert C to FAT32 if it is NTFS.
Boot to the install CD and see if your installation is now visible in the list after pressing enter for a new installation. If so then go ahead and repair it.
If that doesn’t work then boot to the CD again but this time to the recovery console. Log on to the relevant installation and run both fixboot and fixmbr from the command prompt.
If still no success then you will need to create a new (or parallel) installation of XP. Hopefully you will have enough room on the HDD (about 1.5GB is the absolute minimun). After this is installed you should have access to your pc again and probably the multiboot options will work normally. The various boot loading processes should however have been corrected. If not, then at least the system should now see your problem installation, so that when you now boot to the install CD it will allow you to repair it at last!
I have spent much of the last 3 days experimenting with these processes so I thought I would post these thoughts on so others can get some help or ideas if needed and also as a reference that I can refer back to as the grey cells die away.
The following are all examples of things that can cause this (there are bound to be others too):-
Installing an earlier version of Windows after the later version is happily installed.
Reinstating partition image files but not to their original positions.
Copying a whole system partition to another part of the drive in order to move its position or create a backup.
Changing the files (notably the 3 bootloaders – boot.ini, ntldr and netdetect.com) in the root of the C partition or by changing the format of C from FAT to NTFS; this means that DOS-based apps can no longer either read or write to it.
Splitting, merging, deleting, converting (esp from FAT to NTFS) or hiding partitions on the drive.
Marking a partition, other than C, as active can also cause related and more intricate problems.
Forcing a changed drive letter for any system partition.
As long as the partition containing the previously working os is not written over or obliterated by formatting, etc then I have always, eventually, been able to get it functioning normally again. Sometimes this has taken a lot of "juggling".
In essence this often means doing a repair installation of XP and for which it is essential that you have the installation CD and know the product key. Remember to enable the BIOS to be able to boot from the CD. It is also recommended to always attempt these repairs by booting to the CD and not running it from within windows; the prompts are harder to read but less confusing. Bad luck if you only have a restore disk or restore files on the HDD; you may then be into the road of using recovery software.
However, the above manouvres can trick the system into not displaying the installation you want to repair and appear to leave you stumped. What may seem strange is that you will usually be able to logon to the problem partition to do a “repair” using the recovery console, but when you try to actually repair the whole installation it does not show up in the list.
I would advise that all the following steps be taken. If you have real important data then backup the whole drive by slaving it to another pc and make an image of it there before starting. As a minimum, backup just the important partitions using something like Norton's Ghost or PQ's DriveImage or DriveCopy.
First make a copy of the three main boot loaders from C onto a floppy. It is wise to have a copy of these in any case. You may have to edit just the boot.ini file manually, but generally the original one will work fine and usually be able to get you back into your system.
Recommend removing any slave drive temporarily so that drive lettering is less likely to get confusing.
With or without this floppy, you may still get a “hal.dll is missing or corrupt” message after attempting to boot.
Now if you can’t get into any OS you will need Partition Magic (or similar) on floppies. Start it and ensure that C: (assuming this is the normal boot partition) is the only active partition. Unhide any hidden partitions (utilities or os installations may have done this hiding during their various processes). Finally I would suggest converting all partitions from NTFS to FAT32 using PM. You can convert them back afterwards when you are ready. Hopefully no file encryption is in place or this wont work. The ideas behing this are to make everything as visible as possible to everything. As a minimum convert C to FAT32 if it is NTFS.
Boot to the install CD and see if your installation is now visible in the list after pressing enter for a new installation. If so then go ahead and repair it.
If that doesn’t work then boot to the CD again but this time to the recovery console. Log on to the relevant installation and run both fixboot and fixmbr from the command prompt.
If still no success then you will need to create a new (or parallel) installation of XP. Hopefully you will have enough room on the HDD (about 1.5GB is the absolute minimun). After this is installed you should have access to your pc again and probably the multiboot options will work normally. The various boot loading processes should however have been corrected. If not, then at least the system should now see your problem installation, so that when you now boot to the install CD it will allow you to repair it at last!
I have spent much of the last 3 days experimenting with these processes so I thought I would post these thoughts on so others can get some help or ideas if needed and also as a reference that I can refer back to as the grey cells die away.