XP won't boot - no recovery console

[Marc]

My XP Pro system won't boot and the recovery console won't
work. During the boot I get the regular black Windows
secreen with the moving bar but no further. Safe mode
starts up with the driver list as expected but then just
hangs. The recovery console just says examing disk ... but
no further. I tried starting up with another boot drive
but the system will hang with the drive attached.

This started after I ran 'chkdsk' - it found some kind of
error- and I allowed it to run on next startup. Then
nothing worked. Also this is a SATA Samsung 80 drive with
an integrated VIA SATA on MB. I've loaded the drivers
using F6 during XP setup.

If Windows setup won't work and I can't mount the drive is
there any other way to reformat? Any ideas before I send
the drive back?
Thanks.

 

[Bob Harris]

First, the recovery console should work, hen run form the CDROM.

However, if you needed to give XP drivers via F6 during the initial
installation, you will also need to do the same thing when you run the
recovery console. (I need to do this when I run it on my Seagate SATA
disks.) Remember, that the recovery console is intended to handle some
fairly serious problems, including those in which X can not read a disk,
hence can not get the drivers you initially loaded. Watch for the message
about drivers, because it comes and goes very fast.

I would try a number of things before reformating, but if you really want to
do that, you can use the recovery console by deleting all partitions.
Creating new ones is optional, since the XP installation should do that for
you. However, I would probably make a partition of two and format them
while I was at it.

If the recovery console is uncooperative, try using the latest version of
FDISK, run form a boot floppy. Be sure to remove all partition on the disk.
NTFS partitions show as "non DOS" partitions. Ge to www.bootdisk.com for a
bootdisk and/or FDISK.