Booting system at MS-DOS prompt

[adam]

Hi:

Running Win XP home edition. Mouse pointer was frozen last
night while screen saver was on. Tried to CTRL-ALT-DEL and
wound up powering off. The Windows XP logo appeared at
power-up and then a message that there was a problem with
the harddrive, please see your troubleshooting handbook. I
booted to the A:| prompt with a floppy, typed in

%systemroot%\system32\restore\rstrui.exe

and keep getting Bad Command Prompt.

Anything else I can do?

Adam

 

[Paul B T Hodges]

Hey Adam,

Do you have the release cd,if so you could try booting the recovery console
and running chkdsk on the windows xp partition.

Make sure boot from cd is selected in the bios, shove in the cd, start the
system, and then enter R at the first prompt from the setup program.

Whats this floppy you're booting from ?

Did you create it or did it come with the system, can you list the files it
contains ?

Paul

 

[adam]

Since XP was released there has been a lot of confusion
about startup disks, boot disks, and also MS-DOS startup
disks. A MS-DOS startup disk is not a substitute for the
boot disks that you might be familiar with from Windows
95/98/Me. It performs one function and one function only.
It gets you to the A:\ prompt from a cold boot. The
following list of files is placed on the MS-DOS startup
disk when the procedure listed below is performed.

Directory of A:\

AUTOEXEC.BAT
COMMAND.COM
KEYB.COM
MODE.COM
EGA.CPI
EGA2.CPI
EGA3.CPI
CONFIG.SYS
DISPLAY.SYS
IO.SYS
KEYBOARD.SYS
KEYBRD2.SYS
KEYBRD3.SYS
KEYBRD4.SYS
MSDOS.SYS

 

[Paul B T Hodges]

That IS just a bog standard dos boot disk.

I can't see how thats going to help, it doesn't have any utilies even if XP
was installed on a FAT partiton, do you happen to know if xp is on a FAT or
NTFS partition ?

Do you have the release CD ?



Was XP installed on a fat or an ntfs partition ?

 

[Paul B T Hodges]

Oh, I forgot theinitial point I was going to make , dos is a 16bit
ooperating system, so you can't run 32 bit programs under it, like
rstrui.exe, even if you can access the file if xps partition is FAT

Paul

 

[adam]

I have no idea about the FAT. I was told by Gateway that
getting to the MS DOS prompt would at least let me boot
the system with the %systemroot%... command. I have the OS
software that came with the system.

 

[Paul B T Hodges]

FAT is the old style files system which was used under windows 98 and
before, you can access it from dos. On the other hand NTFS can't be accessed
from dos.

Whats is the config.sys and autoexec.bat file ?
Post these.

Also if you try and access the c: drive, does it let you ,

try

C:
dir

Does it come back with anything ?

Paul

 

[Sandy]

I am having a similar problem as Adam. I tried c:dir and
I get " An error occured during directory enumeration"
HELP????

 

[Paul B T Hodges]

Hey Sandy,

Are you booting from an msdos floppy ?

Do you have a windows xp retail cd or the manufacturers recovery cd which
will give you access to the windows xp recovery console, you need to run
chkdsk over the partition.

Paul