B
Bruce
Hi,
Last night my daughter's Dell Inspiron 8600 wouldn't boot up. Here's
what happened:
Things were working fine, but she wanted to get into Safe Mode to do some
diagnostics. When she rebooted and hit F8, the machine black screened
and said she had not shut down properly, and she could choose Last Known
Good Command, Normal Start, Safe Mode, R for repair, etc.
One message did say that C:\windows\system32\config\system was missing or
corrupt.
(Sorry, I don't have the exact verbage since I wasn't there at the
beginning.)
Oh, o! Registry?
All selections brought us right back to the above screen, so we dedcided
to try a repair of the current install and inserted the OEM XPHome CD.
We booted up, hit F12 (the Dell way to select a boot from CD), and
selected R for repair. The machine entered the blue, DOS looking Windows
Setup screen, and installed all the hardware drivers from the CD to the
hard drive. It then asked me what instance of Windows did I want to
repair:
1: C:\windows
I only had one instance, so I selected 1, and I was logged on to:
C:\windows
That's all that happened. Nothing. I had to type EXIT to get out, but
this just brought up the initial screen, above.
I called Dell. The technician had me get back to C:\windows, and enter:
chkdsk /p /r
The machine showed the volume and date of creation, which was the
shipping date, and then went on to chkdsk. This took about 45 mins.
When completed, the message was that one file or folder was fixed.
I restarted the machine, and all was well. I tried to get into to Safe
Mode, which is what my daughter was doing when this all 'broke'. I was
able to get into Safe Mode just fine; when I tried to get out of Safe
Mode, I got program stopped responding, so I hit OK to get out. I'm not
too worried about this, since the machine is working alright now, but I
have a question:
I remember chkdsk as a DOS command, but I didn't think it fixed anything.
I thought it only reported.
What are the switches /p and /r ? Did this process replace the damaged
file with one that was in a restore folder? Was this just the command
line method to do a restore?
Any idea what caused the problem in the first place?
Sincerely,
Bruce
Last night my daughter's Dell Inspiron 8600 wouldn't boot up. Here's
what happened:
Things were working fine, but she wanted to get into Safe Mode to do some
diagnostics. When she rebooted and hit F8, the machine black screened
and said she had not shut down properly, and she could choose Last Known
Good Command, Normal Start, Safe Mode, R for repair, etc.
One message did say that C:\windows\system32\config\system was missing or
corrupt.
(Sorry, I don't have the exact verbage since I wasn't there at the
beginning.)
Oh, o! Registry?
All selections brought us right back to the above screen, so we dedcided
to try a repair of the current install and inserted the OEM XPHome CD.
We booted up, hit F12 (the Dell way to select a boot from CD), and
selected R for repair. The machine entered the blue, DOS looking Windows
Setup screen, and installed all the hardware drivers from the CD to the
hard drive. It then asked me what instance of Windows did I want to
repair:
1: C:\windows
I only had one instance, so I selected 1, and I was logged on to:
C:\windows
That's all that happened. Nothing. I had to type EXIT to get out, but
this just brought up the initial screen, above.
I called Dell. The technician had me get back to C:\windows, and enter:
chkdsk /p /r
The machine showed the volume and date of creation, which was the
shipping date, and then went on to chkdsk. This took about 45 mins.
When completed, the message was that one file or folder was fixed.
I restarted the machine, and all was well. I tried to get into to Safe
Mode, which is what my daughter was doing when this all 'broke'. I was
able to get into Safe Mode just fine; when I tried to get out of Safe
Mode, I got program stopped responding, so I hit OK to get out. I'm not
too worried about this, since the machine is working alright now, but I
have a question:
I remember chkdsk as a DOS command, but I didn't think it fixed anything.
I thought it only reported.
What are the switches /p and /r ? Did this process replace the damaged
file with one that was in a restore folder? Was this just the command
line method to do a restore?
Any idea what caused the problem in the first place?
Sincerely,
Bruce