XP pro startup loop after BSOD

[weetutniet]

I'm getting a little desperate, please help.
I have an old P3 Lifetec system with a fairly new Maxtor diamondmax 80GB harddisk. The disk is divided in four partitions, all containing at least some relevant data. I guess the system has been stable for too long! I know I should have followed a sensible back up stategy but haven't done so for too long.

Last week I was a little hasty perhaps in forcing the system to stop. After the restart it ended up in a startup loop after showing the black screen with the Windows logo and the little bar below it showing activity.
Starting in safe mode it shows that it runs (I think it is running or maybe installing) a long list of .sys files and stops at BTHidMgr.sys. It waits a while and restarts. I have renamed the this specific file but then it simply stops at the mup.sys that was one position before. So I suppose whatever should happen after HidMgr is where the show stops.

Telling it (via F8) to not restart, it stops at a BSOD with the error code STOP: 0x0000007B(0xF8B15528, 0xc0000034,0x00000000,0x00000000).

I can see the disk correctly (as far I I can judge) in BIOS. With UBCD4WIN I can see the drive in system manager, but not in disk manager and neither in My Computer. With the XP setup CD it does not access the disk in Recovery console nor in setup. So I cannot access the partitions from this windows environment.

Starting the PC with an old windows 98 start-up diskette I do get access to the partitions on a DOS level, with truncated names such as 'docume~1' for 'documents and settings'.

I have an old 5G harddisk added as a slave, which I can also access at DOS level. So what I could do is draw the total tree of the C partition on paper down to the deepest file level and copy collections of say 4.5G to the slave. Then start up UBCD4WIN and move these files to my external USB harddrive (which is not found at DOS level) and repeat this until I have most of the C drive copied, hoping that I can later filter out the relevant data assuming the long Windows filenames come back.

After this immensely mindkilling exercise I could try to format C at Dos level and hope that Windows Set Up wil do its job and start collecting all drivers and programs I had installed and finally try to get the datafiles associated with these programmes back to their right position from the USB drive. Sounds like a weeks work!

With Google I find more or less similar problems all over the net, but no solutions that work for me so far.

Hope someone can help me to solve ( and preferably understand) this....

[Paul Komski]

Reboot loops like that are commonly due to malconfiguration of the boot files and boot sectors - though if you cannot get to the recovery console using the first R for repair it cuts out a lot of the possible repair command lines and using a XP QuickBoot Diskette is unlikely to work since the initial boot process does seem to function up to the "loading bar". You can try the one the from bootdisk.com (towards the bottom of this page (http://bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm)) or you could try my own boot CD as outlined HERE (http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showpost.php?p=394270&postcount=7). BSODs and SafeMode "sticking" both also imply file system or file corruption.

It is very likely that you could much more easily retrieve data using either Knoppix (in my sig) or a BartPE CD with its A43 explorer plug-in both of which would not have the long-file-name truncation that you get from DOS accessing FAT partitions. You are unlikely to get the programs reinstallable that way nor recover the drivers without a lot of luck and work but your data should likely be recoverable. If by any chance you can "get in" using an XP Quick Boot diskette or CD then let us know because a repair installation might then be a possiblility.

[Sylvander]

Advanced troubleshooting for "Stop 0x0000007B" errors in Windows XP (http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=324103).

[weetutniet]

Thanx Paul and Sylvander!

The Windows page did not help much (happens to me quite often somehow!).
I tried the boot disk from bootdisk.com, but that did not help either.

HOWEVER:
Believe it or not: I'm back up without a reinstall!! And so happy I will share what I did with you.

After a lot of searching and not finding much I downloaded XXCOPY16 and deltree. These gave me a workable option to copy much of the disk in a few steps to my external drive. It was a lengthy exercise and surely messed up the filenames and also gave some errors, apparently because I ended up with too deep paths.

Having done that I was more courageous in approaching the disk. On the UBCD4WIN disk I found TestDisk. In the CMD environment this appears like a DOS level utility. It saw my disk and its partitions (after a while I noticed that when starting the porgram it mist my first logical partition. This showed in Quick search and looked OK. The deeper search option showed this partition three times in different sizes of which one was the one also visible in quicksearch.

Finally I went to a new start of testdisk, did quicksearch and dared to select 'write' which as I figured would tell the FAT to give me back the missing partition.

I should mention that in the mean time I had also done a scandisk surface scan which repaired one spot on the disk.

After the TestDisk write I restarted which brought me back to Windows in a longer exercise than the loop I had experienced before and it went into Scandisk. This reported no problems and Windows started!!! So far it seems to work like before. I will start backing up stuff asap now!!

I still cannot see through the startup loop, though. If my quick action caused a messup in my FAT, how could a startup come as far as the Windows 'loading bar' is a mystery to me! If it makes sense to you I'd be interested to know.

Hope this is of help to someone else too.

[Paul Komski]

which as I figured would tell the FAT to give me back the missing partitionTestDisk would have reinstated the correct parameters for the EPBR (the Extended Partition Boot Record) of the Logical Partition or the entry for the Extended Partition in the MBR (Master Boot Record) rather than do anything at all to the FAT tables.

If my quick action caused a messup in my FAT, how could a startup come as far as the Windows 'loading bar' is a mystery to me! If it makes sense to you I'd be interested to know.As stated it has nothing to do with FAT per se. If the partition arrangements have been altered then the boot process gets confused since elements it expects to find in one place are no longer there. That is a common reason for reboot loops though the actual specific mechanism may vary from system to system.

It was always likely that you could recover your system because you could, as a minimum, find your data (be it all with LFNs truncated).