What to Do When XP or 2000 Won't Boot

General Topics
1

I just came accross the following and after my NO Boot yesterday morning and a visit to my local ( with in 40 miles ) repair shop got prepaired for next time.

Lincoln Spector
From the November 2003 issue of PC World magazine
Windows XP won’t load on my computer. What should I do?

If Windows XP (or 2000) refuses to start, press F8 right after you turn on your PC but before the Windows log-on appears (it may take a few attempts to get the timing right). At the resulting menu, select Last Known Good Configuration to restore your Registry to an earlier date.

If this doesn’t get your PC working, reboot and press F8 again, but this time select Safe Mode, and then choose Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, System Restore. Follow the wizard’s instructions and pick an appropriate backup.

If that approach doesn’t work either, or if you can’t even get to this menu, use your emergency boot floppy. If your hard drive’s boot sector or Windows’ basic boot files have been corrupted, this disk will circumvent the problem and boot you into Windows. If you don’t have an emergency boot floppy, you may be able to use one created on another PC running Windows XP or Windows 2000, but there’s no guarantee that it will boot your machine.

To make one, insert a blank floppy disk into drive A:, select Start, All Programs, Accessories, Command Prompt, type format a:, and press Enter. When asked if you want to format another disk, type n and press Enter. Type the following commands, pressing Enter after each one.

xcopy c:\boot.ini a: /h
xcopy c:\ntdetect.com a: /h
xcopy c:\ntldr a: /h

Now type exit and press Enter to close the window. Remove the floppy disk and label it “Windows XP boot floppy.” Put this emergency disk in the floppy drive of your inoperable machine and boot up. Windows should run with no problems. You could simply keep the floppy in the drive all the time, but to truly fix the problem, launch the command prompt as described above, type xcopy a:. c:\ /h, and press Enter.
Hopefully, you’ll have a disk ready should you need it. I didn’t. Very expensive lesson not to be repeated.

2

Bootdisks? http://www.drd.dyndns.org/index2.html here they are :smiley:

XP home startup disk http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=fbe5e4fc-695f-43e5-af05-719f45c382a4&displaylang=en
Repair installation of XP http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;315341
XP revovery console http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;314058

The official bootdisks from Microsoft http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;310994

With XP there is no need for a floppy to boot from, since the XP cd is bootable.

3

I take regular images (weekly in my case) of my primary hard drive and keep a copy of the image on my secondary hard drive.

I boot to floppy, a floppy created by the drive imaging program. from that I select restore Image (select the last one) and about 10 minutes later I’m up and running. I then restore my daily backup (sometimes mor frequently) of volatile data file, word docs, excel, OE database files, addressbook, favorites, etc. etc., another 2 minutes and I am very close to what I had before.

If I am going to do something that may have a great effect on my system, I usually take a fresh image before I apply the change/update, etc. If something goes wrong, then I revert to the image I just backed up.

So the worst case sceanario is I could lose upto 6 days of updates, tweaks, program settings and 1 days volatile data lose. But this is no great problem when compared to the other situation.

You need to have a backup strategy before something happens, rather than wish you had one when something happens.

4

DavidR
Which Imaging program are you using?

5

PowerQuest’s (Symantic bought it out) Drive Image 2002. There are others, Acronis True Image is quite flexable.

Drive Image 2002 is getting a bit lon in the tooth, but it still does the job for me, the latest version will probably be more flexable.

I also set my HDD directory structure up to help backup volatile data. Were ever possible I have programs save documents to my data directory (with sub directories for WP docs, XLS spreadsheets, etc.), rather than being saved in a directory within the actual programs directory.

6

I just noticed that this is also listed in Technicals Post:
http://forum.avast.com/index.php?board=9;action=display;threadid=4818Reply #11.
Technical maybe they got this from you??? ;D

7

Maybe the opposite :wink:

8

Got a clean image on a bootable DVD after a clean install of the os/applications and after configuring them. Using raid 5, and everyday a incremental backup of important things is made to a location in another building, while preserving the backup from the day before. Should be enough to get me back going in 10 - 20 minutes if something fails :smiley:

9

A reasonable source of information on backup strategy can be found here TechTV Backup Basics it might be an old article but the principals still apply. How you impliment them will have progressed with time.