Installation reboots... and my PC is "dead".

[Guest]

Brand new Philips X51 Notebook.

Partition C is XP Home
Partition D is XP Pro
and Partition E is a new one for Vista.

Installation goes OK until it says it needs to restart... all i get is a
flashing cursor and a completely dead PC - can't boot into either XPs.

I tried using XP recovery console to rebuild the bootcfg but to no avail.

Help!

 

[Guest]

can you try running fdisk /mbr from the recovery console?

 

[Guest]

The correct command is "fixmbr".

Since he already stated that he's tried using the recovery console to
"rebuild the bootcfg" I'm guessing he's already tried that.

fdisk /mbr is for fat16/32 drives and most people that are running XP don't
typically use the fat file system(s) for thier fixed disks.

Robert, do you have a WinPE or BartPE disk? Can you access your disks from
there if you do have one? If not, the partitions may be un-recoverable.

Mic

 

[Guest]

fdisk /mbr works for ntfs drives, too. I've used it.

 

[Guest]

fdisk /mbr works for ntfs drives, too. I've used it.

Neat trick, all I get when I type "fdisk" or "fdisk /mbr" at a recovery
console is, "The command is not recognized Type HELP for a list of supported
commands."

I have several DOS and Win 9x floppy disks, but no floppy drive installed.
So I'm not going to try one of those on an NTFS formatted drive.

Not that I think it would work anyway, since fdisk (or DOS, for that matter)
doesn't recognize NTFS partitions.

I've never worked on a Windows XP that was formatted with FAT 32, so I can't
even say if fdisk is available when the drive is FAT32, but I know for sure
it's not available for NTFS.

 

[Guest]

Hello again.

Thanks for your replies guys, very helpful.

I think if I'd done fixmbr it would have fixed it, i'll know that for next
time - thanks.

In a mild panic at 3am I fixed it by reinstalling XP Pro which sorted out
the MBRs for me.

I've since installed Vista on my elderly desktop (XP1800+) with no problems
at all...

Cheers,

- Rob

 

[Guest]

Hello again.

Thanks for your replies guys, very helpful.

I think if I'd done fixmbr it would have fixed it, i'll know that for next
time - thanks.

In a mild panic at 3am I fixed it by reinstalling XP Pro which sorted out
the MBRs for me.

I've since installed Vista on my elderly desktop (XP1800+) with no problems
at all...

Cheers,

- Rob