Incantations for Repairing XP SE2 from CD?

[John K. Taber]

My Windows XP, Home Edition, SE2, refuses to boot. I'm running XP on a
Dell 4700, with a 80 GB Maxtor SATA drive.

My system is dual boot, with Fedora Core 3 installed on a second 80 GB
Maxtor SATA drive; and my boot loader is Grub.

My problem arose when I tried to defrag my XP disk. Defrag seemed to
take far too long, apparently hung at 67% completion, so I stopped the
defrag by clicking stop.

When I tried to start Windows the next day, I wound up with the Blue
Screen, UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME, and the Technical Information of:
*** STOP: 0x000000ED (0x82390370,0xC000009C, ...)

I understand that I need to restore the boot volume, and from Googling
the net, the below incantations, prayers, and propitiations are what I
think I have to do:

1. Use the Reinstallation CD provided by Dell with my system.

2. Have ready my XP PRODUCT KEY pasted on my Dell, and enter if/when asked.

3. Someplace at install time, select "repair" with the R option.

4. Because defrag did not complete, there are probably damaged files. So
I should run "chkdsk /r" to fix.

5. Finally, enter "fixmbr". I have an Admin password, so enter it when
asked, and when notified of a non-standard boot loader, let the
non-standard get wiped out with XP's loader. I'm not sure of the
incantation here.

I would appreciate comments. Do I have it right? Corrections, please.

TIA

John

 

[Bob Harris]

You can run CHKDSK with the /R option from the recovery console, if it can see your hard drive partitions containing NTFS or FAT32 partitions. The XP recovery console will generally not "see" on LINUX-type partitions.

But, if the recovery console can not see the partition containing Windows, that could be due to a corrupted boot record. The FIXMBR command should fix that, although whether it will interfer with GRUB's functioning is something that I do not know, but I suspect that it will remove/deactivate GRUB. So, just in case, be preapred to manually reinstall GRUB.

All this assumes that the hard drive is physically in good shape, the cables are good and still connected, and that the disk controller on the motherboard is still working.

One way to test the hard drive is to see whether the DISKPART command can see anything. I copied this from MS article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314058

DISKPART
diskpart /add /delete device_name drive_name partition_name size
Use this command to manage the partitions on your hard disk volumes. You can use the following options:
/add : Creates a new partition.
/delete : Deletes an existing partition.
device_name : The name of the device that is used to create a new partition.
drive_name : A drive-letter-based name, for example D:.
partition_name : The partition-based name for deleting an existing partition.
size : The size of the new partition in megabytes.
You can determine the device name from the output of the MAP command, for example, \Device\HardDisk0. You can use the partition name instead of the drive name argument, for example, \Device\HardDisk0\Partition1. If you use no arguments, a user interface for managing your partitions appears. << I assume that this will show disks and existing partitions, if it can recognize them, somehting like the DOS-based FDISK.>>

Warning If you use this command, you can damage the partition table if the disk has been upgraded to a dynamic disk configuration. Do not modify the structure of dynamic disks unless you are using the Disk Management tool.

 

[John K. Taber]

Thank you.

I think I understand, so I'll give it a try.

John