Cannot access Recovery Console

[Doug Reiner]

I've used Recovery Console before. However, lately, and for reasons
unknown, I can't get into it. This is not an authentication problem; I
can log in just fine with all of my accounts (including Administrator).

Instead, when I try to get into Recovery Console, it goes through all
the motions, and gets all the way up to the screen where you would
normally select a Windows installation number to access. However, I am
not presented with the name (nor a selection number for) my Windows
partition. The screen displays the following text, and absolutely
nothing else:

Microsoft Windows XP(TM) Recovery Console.
The Recovery Console provides system repair and recovery functionality.
Type EXIT to quit the Recovery Console and restart the computer.

I've tried waiting for the partition list to appear, I've run CHKDSK,
I've tried installing and running Recovery Console from the hard
drive... nothing works. Any ideas would be most welcome.

 

[Doug Reiner]

I've used Recovery Console before. However, lately, and for reasons
unknown, I can't get into it. This is not an authentication problem;
I can log in just fine with all of my accounts (including
Administrator).

Instead, when I try to get into Recovery Console, it goes through all
the motions, and gets all the way up to the screen where you would
normally select a Windows installation number to access. However, I
am not presented with the name (nor a selection number for) my Windows
partition. The screen displays the following text, and absolutely
nothing else:

Microsoft Windows XP(TM) Recovery Console.
The Recovery Console provides system repair and recovery
functionality. Type EXIT to quit the Recovery Console and restart the
computer.

I've tried waiting for the partition list to appear, I've run CHKDSK,
I've tried installing and running Recovery Console from the hard
drive... nothing works. Any ideas would be most welcome.

I solved my own problem (as always). I figured I may as well post some
details here, in hopes of helping someone else out sometime in the
future.

I booted to the WinXP CD, to see what happened if I tried accessing the
Recovery Console that way. I still couldn't get into it (no surprise),
but the screen provided more details for me, since when it hung, the
text at the bottom said "Examining 131070 mb disk 0 at Id 0 in Bus 0 on
ultra...". That made a light bulb go off: It was getting stuck on my
Promise Ultra100 TX2 card.

I already had Recovery Console installed to my hard drive, so all I did
was take the Promise driver file ultra.sys from my
C:\windows\system32\drivers directory, copy it to c:\cmdcons, and delete
the preexisting file c:\cmdcons\ultra.sy_. After that, Recovery Console
worked like its old self again.

Apparently, the problem was that when I installed Recovery Console to my
hard drive, Microsoft assumed they knew better than I did, so an old
version of the ultra.sys driver was used. Well, that old driver didn't
get along with my 160-GB Maxtor hard drive. The new one does.

And that's that.