Mounting the disk in another machine will not modify the data on the
disk unless you slip up and make changes. Are you comfortable moving
drives around from one computer to another and confident that you can do
the proper connections correctly? An alternative would be to install
a second (temporary) Windows 2000/XP on your computer, on another hard
disc or on a different partition and make the changes using that
installation. Do you have more than one hard disc in your computer, or
is your hard disc divided into more than one partition?
John
John,
As I said initially, it's kind of complicated, but (in a nutshell),
yes, there were 2 discs in the computer. The system was initially
configured as a (mirrored) 2-disc RAID. I had a problem with the RAID
hardware, which is where the problems began. I removed the RAID
controller, re-connected the two EIDE drives (as Primary Master and
Slave) and then booted the system. I can't remember what the original
error message was (I've been working on this for 2 days and I'm a bit
hazy on exactly what I've done to get here???), but I ended up removing
the slave disc and then running chkdsk /r on the master. Initially,
when I booted the system after that, the boot process blue screened on
sfcfiles.dll. So I re-started the system from the XP Setup CD and
expanded sfcfiles.dl_ on the CD to c:\windows\system32. When I rebooted
again, I got another blue screen because of lz32.dll. So I did the same
thing (expanded lz32.dll from the CD) and restarted.... I was moving
along slowly but nicely for the next few dlls, but then, all of a
sudden, the option to disable the auto-reboot vanished from the F8 Safe
Mode screen and I had no way of knowing what file was causing the next
problem. When I booted the system, the blue screen popped-up for a
split second (not long enough to read what it says) and then the system
would auto-reboot.
I tried running the Repair option from the Setup CD, but it's not
recognizing the existing Windows installation and keeps wanting to
install a fresh copy. From the Recovery Console (when I boot from the
Setup CD), I can see the entire file system (all of my original folders
and data), but there must be something missing in Windows. I also tried
doing a fixboot and fixmbr, but neither helped. I also tried copying
new ntldr and ntdetect.com files to c:\ from the Setup CD, but no-go
there either.
So, unless you know of another option, I'd be "happy" if I could just
get back to having the system stop on the blue screen during boots so I
can see which dll's are causing the boot to halt.
I hope that makes more sense.
David