PC almost at standstill

[Bob F]

Thanks Bob, I'll try to check out #3. Might take half an hour or so! I
can't see any chance of attempting #1 and #2 in the current state.
And I'm pretty sure #4 isn't the cause.

Both 1 and 2 can be done off floppies, not using windows, so they should work if
anything will. You do need a working machine to download them and create the
floppies.

 

[Terry Pinnell]

Latest info. Disk Mgmt window raises various puzzles:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4019461/DiskMgmt-2.jpg

Device Mgr also shows 3 optical drives instead of the 2 I actually have.
Probably unrelated to the current issue, but reported just in case...

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4019461/Devices-1.jpg

Everything still impossibly slow. Back on main PC to send this during the
¾ hour needed for close/restart, to check if my attempts with sfc /scannow
and my fiddling with page file have had any effect.

Gave up on that and pulled plugs from the lower HD instead. That's looking
more promising. No idea yet what data and programs I now have with only
one of the two 60 GB drives in play, but what joy to have instant response
to clicks and commands again!

What can the experts conclude from this so far please?

Terry, East Grinstead, UK

 

[Chris S.]

Gave up on that and pulled plugs from the lower HD instead. That's looking
more promising. No idea yet what data and programs I now have with only
one of the two 60 GB drives in play, but what joy to have instant response
to clicks and commands again!

What can the experts conclude from this so far please?

Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Quit obvious that the "lower HD" is faulty.
You've found the failing device that is causing your "slowdown".

Chris

 

[Paul]

Gave up on that and pulled plugs from the lower HD instead. That's looking
more promising. No idea yet what data and programs I now have with only
one of the two 60 GB drives in play, but what joy to have instant response
to clicks and commands again!

What can the experts conclude from this so far please?

Terry, East Grinstead, UK

You could have at least tried to look at the SMART stats,
to see how bad it is. Look for "Reallocated Sector Count"
and "Current Pending Sectors". A non-zero Data field for
those, is generally a bad sign. HDTune can read out SMART,
via the "Health" tab.

http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe

Paul

 

[Terry Pinnell]

Simple.

Disconnect the optical drive cable, with the two optical drives on it.
All optical drives should disappear, all *three* of them in Device Manager.
There is a problem there, but I cannot figure out exactly what. And I
think the detection of three devices, where two exist, is *the* problem.
The OS is "pinging" the hardware status of the phantom optical drive,
and that's chewing up cycles.

While you might be running some virtual CDROM software, and mounting
an ISO as an optical drive, somehow I doubt that. You'd probably remember
doing that.

Once the optical drive cable, with two optical drives is removed, you
can try removing or deleting the phantom item in Device Manager.

*******

That would leave the two Maxtor hard drives on the other IDE cable.

The thing that was D: and changed to J:, and you changed it back
to D: again, is "raw". That means you've lost the file system
on it. It could be, there is some damage near the beginning
of the file system. The header of the file system likely no
longer says it is NTFS.

Since it is a logical inside an extended, now you're going to
need to figure out where it starts. Probably two sectors
past where the Extended is located.

With a Linux LiveCD and hexdump, you would normally see
something like this. In this example, you work out a potential
sector offset (do the math to locate where D: starts), and then
when you display the data, the word "NTFS" should show up. That's
how you know you've located it. You can use PTEDIT32 in Windows,
to dump the MBR and get the offset. PTEDIT32 should show the
Extended, and the D: might be a couple sectors past that.

(You can run this first, and capture MBR information... I sometimes
prefer this to using "sudo fdisk /dev/sda" type commands in Linux.)

ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/tools/pq/utilities/PTEDIT32.zip

(Then boot into Linux, and actually track down the beginning of D: .
This is what I use as a disk editor, of sorts. This is the command
I used, to locate a partition on a 3TB hard drive.)

sudo hexdump -C -s 0x20000140000 -n 512 /dev/sdc

20000140000 eb 52 90 4e 54 46 53 20 20 20 20 00 02 08 00 00 |.R.NTFS .....|
20000140010 00 00 00 00 00 f8 00 00 3f 00 ff 00 00 08 00 00 |........?.......|

The program "TestDisk" could scan and locate these things,
but it'll likely run into the same problem, of not seeing
a file system on the old D:. And CHKDSK is not going to
want to run on D:, because at the moment it is raw, and
CHKDSK won't know it needs to run CHKNTFS. There is a way
to tell CHKDSK to run when no drive letter is evident, but
that still doesn't solve the problem of CHKDSK figuring out
which version of tool to run (FAT or NTFS).

(Tool used to repair an MBR. In this case, you may be able
to view files once the tool has scanned the disk. It may
be able to see the file system, but no guarantees. There is
no point repairing the MBR, because it's not the thing that
is broken. So the only reason to run this first tool, is
to see if the files can be listed on the partition or not.)

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

(This is an example of a file scavenger, for cases where
perhaps the MFT (master file table) is gone. Scavenging
if there was no backup...)

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

I don't know how to "hand repair" a file system. I'd be probing
the head of the file system, just to see if the sectors
are readable there or not. It could be, the system will
freeze when you hit the bad spot in the disk.

*******

You can run a tool like this, to try to recover the data on D:
You'll need some more disk space, to put the recovered files.
This is a free tool someone wrote, and when I offered this to
one user, they got their files back. I haven't tested it here.
This tool, the source code, was eventually sold to some other
developer, and the originating web site removed. But archive.org
still has a copy.

http://web.archive.org/web/20070101070056/http://www.woundedmoon.org/win32/driverescue19d.html

driverescue19d.zip 1,007,764 bytes
MD5SUM = 63b7e1e8b1701593d5f52c7927d01558

*******

So now it's a data recover effort on the former D:. Or,
restoring D: from backups and blowing away the file system
on D: using the restoration.

Most of what I've suggested above, is for idle curiosity.
The "driverescue" stands the best odds of getting anything
you don't have backed up from the old D:. But, you'll need
to connect an external USB hard drive, as a place to
put the data, as you've run out of spots on the IDE cables.
The TestDisk and Photorec, are likely poor substitutes
for "driverescue", since driverescue will be attempting
to use an MFT if one can be located. Photorec can't handle
fragmentation for example, and as far as I know, fragmented
files will show up as damaged files if recovered that way.
I have tested Photorec, by copying a file, then erasing
it, and the unfragmented test file was successfully recovered
by scanning for it.

There are any number of $39.95 commercial programs for
data recovery that you could try. Some, they offer
a trial version, that will display the file names as
proof of recoverability. Then you pay the $39.95, and with
the license key in hand, you can complete the recovery
operation.

Paul

Thanks a bunch, Paul, appreciate the thorough reply. But I guess you
didn't see my comment about my low skill level in an earlier post:
"Whatever little I ever once knew about this stuff, is now a blurry
memory. Primary and Secondary Channels? Master and Slave? etc, etc? IOW,
I'm no techie ;-)"

So your "Simple" made me smile!

I actually replied some hours ago via my iPad while in the shed but it
seems to have got lost. Anyway things have moved on now.

The current status is that after disconnecting the lower HD, leaving
partitions C and N, I have regained normal performance - and, of course,
lost all data and programs on D! On balance I'm not too unhappy. I reckon
fro the limited use I make of the PC in my shed (mostly in conjunction
with my practical electronics hobby) I can get by comfortably with 60 GB.

Here's a screenshot summarising the position:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4019461/Status19305May.jpg

One puzzle is that after the reboot to this status, the screen resolution
dropped. I've now dragged the slider to its max and it's stayed there
throughout my last session. (I'll leave the PC running tonight.) Any idea
why it might have dropped down the pixel resolution like that please?

I have a LOT of work left to do, but am very grateful to all who've helped
me. It does indeed look like that HD was about to expire. Guess I'll never
know for sure. I'm scared to connect it again anyway!

 

[Paul]

Thanks a bunch, Paul, appreciate the thorough reply. But I guess you
didn't see my comment about my low skill level in an earlier post:
"Whatever little I ever once knew about this stuff, is now a blurry
memory. Primary and Secondary Channels? Master and Slave? etc, etc? IOW,
I'm no techie ;-)"

So your "Simple" made me smile!

I actually replied some hours ago via my iPad while in the shed but it
seems to have got lost. Anyway things have moved on now.

The current status is that after disconnecting the lower HD, leaving
partitions C and N, I have regained normal performance - and, of course,
lost all data and programs on D! On balance I'm not too unhappy. I reckon
fro the limited use I make of the PC in my shed (mostly in conjunction
with my practical electronics hobby) I can get by comfortably with 60 GB.

Here's a screenshot summarising the position:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4019461/Status19305May.jpg

One puzzle is that after the reboot to this status, the screen resolution
dropped. I've now dragged the slider to its max and it's stayed there
throughout my last session. (I'll leave the PC running tonight.) Any idea
why it might have dropped down the pixel resolution like that please?

I have a LOT of work left to do, but am very grateful to all who've helped
me. It does indeed look like that HD was about to expire. Guess I'll never
know for sure. I'm scared to connect it again anyway!

You know enough to take shots of the BIOS. I think
you're more of a techie than you let on.

The video resolution may drop, if the hardware was somehow
redetected. Normally, that wouldn't happen. You can look for
"setupapi.log" on C:, somewhere in C:\Windows for more details.
Every hardware installation operation gets logged in there.
I've had a few strange ones myself, such as virtually all
my hardware being "rediscovered" one day. Took several minutes
for all the old, existing drivers, to get associated with
the "new" hardware. Dialog boxes flashing on the screen.
No explanation of why. Disks healthy, and no file system damage,
as I use a UPS, and haven't had a dirty shutdown that I know of.
I even run CHKDSK occasionally, to try to cover off latent faults.

What you might consider, is somehow, when installing the video
driver, portions of it (NVidia specific) ended up on D:. And
now they're no longer to be found. You might want to go to
Device Manager, do Properties on the video card, check the
driver file list, and generally see if the video card entry
is still all-healthy. There might be more evidence there,
that something broke with respect to the driver. Since you have
an older video card, you likely won't find the driver on
the NVidia download site - it might require searching their
driver archive, and finding the last "best" driver. That's if you
haven't archived the driver already. I keep my installed driver
files, in a folder called "installed", for easy retrieval later.

I still think you should "pretend" to do data recovery
on the pulled 60GB. You don't get a "half dead" Maxtor that
often, and running Drive Rescue over it would be fun.
Only practical, if you have some place to put the
recovered data. The objective of doing this, is so the
next failed disk, won't be quite as much of a scare.
It helps to have a tool you can trust, in hand.
And with the limitations of CHKDSK, and how it
can't help when there are real problems, you'll
need something from outside Windows, to help with
things like that.

I recommend the same empirical approach, to any RAID
array owner. Learn how to do maintenance on your array,
so when you get a "degraded" or "failed" status, you
won't come screaming in a panic, back to the news group.
The time to test and learn about any new storage capability,
is when it is empty. Whereas, being "forced to learn" when
it is broken, is just the wrong time for learning...
So pretend your 60GB is broken, you have no backup,
and see what you can get from the drive. Then you'll
have a proven solution for next time.

Paul

 

[Terry Pinnell]

The video resolution may drop, if the hardware was somehow
redetected. Normally, that wouldn't happen. You can look for
"setupapi.log" on C:, somewhere in C:\Windows for more details.
Every hardware installation operation gets logged in there.

I took a look at it on this, my main XP PC (a mere 4 years old) and it's a
612 KB file. Never seen it before. Last 5 of 6418 lines are:

[2013/04/16 08:03:15 5140.729]
#-198 Command line processed: "C:\WINDOWS\Explorer.EXE"
/IDLIST,:7204:1932,/S
#-166 Device install function: DIF_PROPERTYCHANGE.
#I292 Changing device properties of "ROOT\MS_PSCHEDMP\0001".
#I306 DICS_START: Device has been started.

Virtually incomprehensible to me! And no dates/times?

I've had a few strange ones myself, such as virtually all
my hardware being "rediscovered" one day. Took several minutes
for all the old, existing drivers, to get associated with
the "new" hardware. Dialog boxes flashing on the screen.
No explanation of why. Disks healthy, and no file system damage,
as I use a UPS, and haven't had a dirty shutdown that I know of.
I even run CHKDSK occasionally, to try to cover off latent faults.

What you might consider, is somehow, when installing the video
driver, portions of it (NVidia specific) ended up on D:. And
now they're no longer to be found. You might want to go to
Device Manager, do Properties on the video card, check the
driver file list, and generally see if the video card entry
is still all-healthy. There might be more evidence there,
that something broke with respect to the driver. Since you have
an older video card, you likely won't find the driver on
the NVidia download site - it might require searching their
driver archive, and finding the last "best" driver. That's if you
haven't archived the driver already. I keep my installed driver
files, in a folder called "installed", for easy retrieval later.

Thanks, I'll investigate along those lines.

I still think you should "pretend" to do data recovery
on the pulled 60GB. You don't get a "half dead" Maxtor that
often, and running Drive Rescue over it would be fun.
Only practical, if you have some place to put the
recovered data. The objective of doing this, is so the
next failed disk, won't be quite as much of a scare.
It helps to have a tool you can trust, in hand.
And with the limitations of CHKDSK, and how it
can't help when there are real problems, you'll
need something from outside Windows, to help with
things like that.

I recommend the same empirical approach, to any RAID
array owner. Learn how to do maintenance on your array,
so when you get a "degraded" or "failed" status, you
won't come screaming in a panic, back to the news group.
The time to test and learn about any new storage capability,
is when it is empty. Whereas, being "forced to learn" when
it is broken, is just the wrong time for learning...
So pretend your 60GB is broken, you have no backup,
and see what you can get from the drive. Then you'll
have a proven solution for next time.

OK, I'm curious about it too. I'll see what I can do once I've stabilised
the new '1 HD, 2 partition system'. But when I reconnect the failing HD,
won't I be plunged back into the almost frozen behaviour?

 

[Paul]

The video resolution may drop, if the hardware was somehow
redetected. Normally, that wouldn't happen. You can look for
"setupapi.log" on C:, somewhere in C:\Windows for more details.
Every hardware installation operation gets logged in there.

I took a look at it on this, my main XP PC (a mere 4 years old) and it's a
612 KB file. Never seen it before. Last 5 of 6418 lines are:

[2013/04/16 08:03:15 5140.729]
#-198 Command line processed: "C:\WINDOWS\Explorer.EXE"
/IDLIST,:7204:1932,/S
#-166 Device install function: DIF_PROPERTYCHANGE.
#I292 Changing device properties of "ROOT\MS_PSCHEDMP\0001".
#I306 DICS_START: Device has been started.

Virtually incomprehensible to me! And no dates/times?

I've had a few strange ones myself, such as virtually all
my hardware being "rediscovered" one day. Took several minutes
for all the old, existing drivers, to get associated with
the "new" hardware. Dialog boxes flashing on the screen.
No explanation of why. Disks healthy, and no file system damage,
as I use a UPS, and haven't had a dirty shutdown that I know of.
I even run CHKDSK occasionally, to try to cover off latent faults.

What you might consider, is somehow, when installing the video
driver, portions of it (NVidia specific) ended up on D:. And
now they're no longer to be found. You might want to go to
Device Manager, do Properties on the video card, check the
driver file list, and generally see if the video card entry
is still all-healthy. There might be more evidence there,
that something broke with respect to the driver. Since you have
an older video card, you likely won't find the driver on
the NVidia download site - it might require searching their
driver archive, and finding the last "best" driver. That's if you
haven't archived the driver already. I keep my installed driver
files, in a folder called "installed", for easy retrieval later.

Thanks, I'll investigate along those lines.

I still think you should "pretend" to do data recovery
on the pulled 60GB. You don't get a "half dead" Maxtor that
often, and running Drive Rescue over it would be fun.
Only practical, if you have some place to put the
recovered data. The objective of doing this, is so the
next failed disk, won't be quite as much of a scare.
It helps to have a tool you can trust, in hand.
And with the limitations of CHKDSK, and how it
can't help when there are real problems, you'll
need something from outside Windows, to help with
things like that.

I recommend the same empirical approach, to any RAID
array owner. Learn how to do maintenance on your array,
so when you get a "degraded" or "failed" status, you
won't come screaming in a panic, back to the news group.
The time to test and learn about any new storage capability,
is when it is empty. Whereas, being "forced to learn" when
it is broken, is just the wrong time for learning...
So pretend your 60GB is broken, you have no backup,
and see what you can get from the drive. Then you'll
have a proven solution for next time.

OK, I'm curious about it too. I'll see what I can do once I've stabilised
the new '1 HD, 2 partition system'. But when I reconnect the failing HD,
won't I be plunged back into the almost frozen behaviour?

A quick Google, says the "MS_PSCHEDMP" thing is related to
Packet Scheduler Mini Port (psched.sys) and could have something to
do with wireless.

The date string for that one, is [ 2013/04/16 ... ] so it was some
time in April.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc961439.aspx

"QoS Packet Scheduler (Psched.sys)

The QoS Packet Scheduler retrieves the packets from the
queues and transmits them according to the QoS parameters,
which generally include a scheduled rate and some indication
of priority."

Haven't a clue how it got there.

*******

Absolutely, you'll be plunged back into the frozen behavior.

Maybe you have some other machine and setup, where the disk
doesn't cause quite as many problems ? (Place it on an
IDE cable, on the end connector, by itself. Run as Master
or Cable Select.)

You could probably try that on your current system. Put
one hard drive on each cable, using the end connector.
Disconnect the optical drives while testing. You fill the
end connector first, with the middle connector only getting
used if two storage devices are on the cable.

I'd have suggested putting it in a USB IDE enclosure, but
I really don't think that is going to work very well. I'd
probably start testing, with an IDE cable, and have the
drive by itself. In the hope that it wouldn't annoy
another disk on the cable.

Paul

 

[Chris Whelan]

On Wed, 05 Jun 2013 22:58:39 +0000, TMack wrote:

[...]

Refusing to use
something that is so useful and so easy is just plain ****ing stupid.

+1

Chris

 

[Rob Morley]

I still think you should "pretend" to do data recovery
on the pulled 60GB. You don't get a "half dead" Maxtor that
often, and running Drive Rescue over it would be fun.

Depends on the failure mode - if the slowdown was caused by thrashing
the disk doing re-reads (particularly if it was just a small area
of disk that had errors) then recovery might be worth attempting, but if
the problem is a faulty board then it's just going to flood the
controller with crap. Or it could still be the controller on the mobo
that has lost a channel - we haven't done enough substitution to rule
that out.

 

[Terry Pinnell]

<Groan> Back to 'no boot' status. And possibly worse. Ready to dump it and
buy a cheap Win 7 PC. But it was OK only hours ago, so that would be so
frustrating.

It was running fine when I returned to shed this morning. Just to make
sure I powered off, replaced the cover and restarted. It soon became
apparent it was endlessly rebooting. The familiar boot option screen
appeared with its two options I'd set up a decade ago. It loaded the first
(the default). Went through the next phase ... then started over.

I tried the second option but that displayed an error message. Too
depressed at the time to take a photo.

I could think of no way to proceed. It seems clear that if I could
experimentally edit the boot.ini I could get in again. Catch 22 situation:
how can I edit it if I can't boot?

I decided I had no choice so I altered the BIOS boot tab, so that the
options were
1. Floppy (not loaded)
2. Disabled (instead of HD)
3. CD drive
4. Some network thing (no internet connection so irrelevant)

Then I rebooted to the OEM XP Home Recovery CD.

I chose the repair option. It loaded many files. At one stage it asked me
for an NVIDIA CD which I either never had or have since lost. But
proceeded anyway.

Eventually it failed with some obscure message about being unable to link
to something due to a missing DLL.

I then rebooted and somehow found myself re-installing Windows
("completion in 39 minutes") so I resigned myself to that. It got past the
stage of entering my registration code but failed at some stage with
another obscure error.

I rebooted with an old Rescue CD I'd made (but never used), GParted or
something, in which eventually I got a totally alien (Linux?) environment.
But it did still show the two partitions, with the correct sizes. However,
the system partition had a note that it had a bad sector! So can I infer
that it too is now on the blink?

Anyway, I had no idea how to proceed so I closed that.

Is there any no-brainer way I can get back in to either
- play with c:\boot.ini
- or use CHKDSK on C

Or any other suggestions anyone please?

 

[Rob Morley]

<Groan> Back to 'no boot' status. And possibly worse. Ready to dump
it and buy a cheap Win 7 PC. But it was OK only hours ago, so that
would be so frustrating.

It was running fine when I returned to shed this morning. Just to make
sure I powered off, replaced the cover and restarted. It soon became
apparent it was endlessly rebooting. The familiar boot option screen
appeared with its two options I'd set up a decade ago. It loaded the
first (the default). Went through the next phase ... then started
over.

I tried the second option but that displayed an error message. Too
depressed at the time to take a photo.

I could think of no way to proceed. It seems clear that if I could
experimentally edit the boot.ini I could get in again. Catch 22
situation: how can I edit it if I can't boot?

I decided I had no choice so I altered the BIOS boot tab, so that the
options were
1. Floppy (not loaded)
2. Disabled (instead of HD)
3. CD drive
4. Some network thing (no internet connection so irrelevant)

Then I rebooted to the OEM XP Home Recovery CD.

I chose the repair option. It loaded many files. At one stage it
asked me for an NVIDIA CD which I either never had or have since
lost. But proceeded anyway.

Eventually it failed with some obscure message about being unable to
link to something due to a missing DLL.

I then rebooted and somehow found myself re-installing Windows
("completion in 39 minutes") so I resigned myself to that. It got
past the stage of entering my registration code but failed at some
stage with another obscure error.

I rebooted with an old Rescue CD I'd made (but never used), GParted or
something, in which eventually I got a totally alien (Linux?)
environment. But it did still show the two partitions, with the
correct sizes. However, the system partition had a note that it had a
bad sector! So can I infer that it too is now on the blink?

Anyway, I had no idea how to proceed so I closed that.

Is there any no-brainer way I can get back in to either
- play with c:\boot.ini
- or use CHKDSK on C

Or any other suggestions anyone please?

Can't remember if you ever ran memtest, that should have been one of
the first things to try.
Can you check the drives and cables in another machine?

 

[Paul]

<Groan> Back to 'no boot' status. And possibly worse. Ready to dump it and
buy a cheap Win 7 PC. But it was OK only hours ago, so that would be so
frustrating.

It was running fine when I returned to shed this morning. Just to make
sure I powered off, replaced the cover and restarted. It soon became
apparent it was endlessly rebooting. The familiar boot option screen
appeared with its two options I'd set up a decade ago. It loaded the first
(the default). Went through the next phase ... then started over.

I tried the second option but that displayed an error message. Too
depressed at the time to take a photo.

I could think of no way to proceed. It seems clear that if I could
experimentally edit the boot.ini I could get in again. Catch 22 situation:
how can I edit it if I can't boot?

I decided I had no choice so I altered the BIOS boot tab, so that the
options were
1. Floppy (not loaded)
2. Disabled (instead of HD)
3. CD drive
4. Some network thing (no internet connection so irrelevant)

Then I rebooted to the OEM XP Home Recovery CD.

I chose the repair option. It loaded many files. At one stage it asked me
for an NVIDIA CD which I either never had or have since lost. But
proceeded anyway.

Eventually it failed with some obscure message about being unable to link
to something due to a missing DLL.

I then rebooted and somehow found myself re-installing Windows
("completion in 39 minutes") so I resigned myself to that. It got past the
stage of entering my registration code but failed at some stage with
another obscure error.

I rebooted with an old Rescue CD I'd made (but never used), GParted or
something, in which eventually I got a totally alien (Linux?) environment.
But it did still show the two partitions, with the correct sizes. However,
the system partition had a note that it had a bad sector! So can I infer
that it too is now on the blink?

Anyway, I had no idea how to proceed so I closed that.

Is there any no-brainer way I can get back in to either
- play with c:\boot.ini
- or use CHKDSK on C

Or any other suggestions anyone please?

Your Windows CD, has a recovery console option. There,
you're sitting in a Command Prompt window that takes up
the whole screen. This shows the kick off point.

http://images.techtree.com/ttimages/story/105281_recoveryconsole.gif

From there, you can run CHKDSK on the OS partition.
Recovery console environments, the drive letters
don't necessarily line up with the original assignments,
so you have to check where your OS has gone (it might be
e: instead of c: or something). This is one reason I
keep an empty file named IMWINXP.txt in my WinXP C:
partition If listing the partition, shows that file,
I know where I am

In principle, you could edit boot.ini from there, if
there was a text editor. I'm not sure if there is. They
have this instead, but this isn't bulletproof. You might
want to "copy boot.ini boot.ini.bak", that sort of thing,
before trying "bootcfg /rebuild".

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/fixtheproblem/ht/repairbootini.htm

Other options are "fixmbr" and "fixboot". Fixmbr loads
440 bytes of boot code, into sector 0 (MBR). Fixboot,
load the partition boot sector. The partition boot sector
is several sectors of stuff, very close to the start of the
C: partition (just before the file system header appears).

The command line options to CHKDSK, are not consistent between
versions. So you'll want to research what options would
work in the recovery console.

So one recovery option, is to fire up that
Command Prompt and work from there.

*******

But, you've been trying to do a repair install, and
what state will the files on C: be in now ? Is the
boot.ini aligned with the contents of C: ? Is C:
currently a valid OS or not ? If you'd installed
WinXP in a second partition, perhaps the files in
the old C: would be intact. If you got half way through
a repair install, does it back out ?

Paul

 

[Terry Pinnell]

Your Windows CD, has a recovery console option. There,
you're sitting in a Command Prompt window that takes up
the whole screen. This shows the kick off point.

http://images.techtree.com/ttimages/story/105281_recoveryconsole.gif

From there, you can run CHKDSK on the OS partition.
Recovery console environments, the drive letters
don't necessarily line up with the original assignments,
so you have to check where your OS has gone (it might be
e: instead of c: or something). This is one reason I
keep an empty file named IMWINXP.txt in my WinXP C:
partition If listing the partition, shows that file,
I know where I am

In principle, you could edit boot.ini from there, if
there was a text editor. I'm not sure if there is. They
have this instead, but this isn't bulletproof. You might
want to "copy boot.ini boot.ini.bak", that sort of thing,
before trying "bootcfg /rebuild".

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/fixtheproblem/ht/repairbootini.htm

Other options are "fixmbr" and "fixboot". Fixmbr loads
440 bytes of boot code, into sector 0 (MBR). Fixboot,
load the partition boot sector. The partition boot sector
is several sectors of stuff, very close to the start of the
C: partition (just before the file system header appears).

The command line options to CHKDSK, are not consistent between
versions. So you'll want to research what options would
work in the recovery console.

So one recovery option, is to fire up that
Command Prompt and work from there.

*******

But, you've been trying to do a repair install, and
what state will the files on C: be in now ? Is the
boot.ini aligned with the contents of C: ? Is C:
currently a valid OS or not ? If you'd installed
WinXP in a second partition, perhaps the files in
the old C: would be intact. If you got half way through
a repair install, does it back out ?

Paul

Paul, Rob: Thanks both. I gave up and went out and bought a refurbished 40
GB HD with same fittings as the bad MAXTOR. This time the OEM Recovery CD
*did* run to a successful conclusion.

Had already tried Recovery Console but it was inaccessible.

So now at least I have a clean start and can press on with the daunting
re-installation of at least 50 programs/utilities and restoration of many
files. Handicapped with no internet connection, this will mean much
shuttling between office and shed with USB memory stick.

Only half hour on the fresh installation but a couple of quirks so far:
I loaded my first program from a very old CD (Creative Sound Blaster, to
get some audio). The PC rebooted and reported a "serious Windows error".
The disc was rather dirty even after cleaning attempts, but never
experienced it cause a reboot before.

A second program installed OK on same drive.

Also, I can no longer get the particular screen resolution I had before,
and haven't found one that is as satisfactory. I wonder if my choice of
res (higher than the freshly installed default), in combination with the
CD install, could have triggered the reboot?

 

[Rob Morley]

Paul, Rob: Thanks both. I gave up and went out and bought a
refurbished 40 GB HD with same fittings as the bad MAXTOR. This time
the OEM Recovery CD *did* run to a successful conclusion.

Did you run memtest yet?

 

[Paul]

Paul, Rob: Thanks both. I gave up and went out and bought a refurbished 40
GB HD with same fittings as the bad MAXTOR. This time the OEM Recovery CD
*did* run to a successful conclusion.

Had already tried Recovery Console but it was inaccessible.

So now at least I have a clean start and can press on with the daunting
re-installation of at least 50 programs/utilities and restoration of many
files. Handicapped with no internet connection, this will mean much
shuttling between office and shed with USB memory stick.

Only half hour on the fresh installation but a couple of quirks so far:
I loaded my first program from a very old CD (Creative Sound Blaster, to
get some audio). The PC rebooted and reported a "serious Windows error".
The disc was rather dirty even after cleaning attempts, but never
experienced it cause a reboot before.

A second program installed OK on same drive.

Also, I can no longer get the particular screen resolution I had before,
and haven't found one that is as satisfactory. I wonder if my choice of
res (higher than the freshly installed default), in combination with the
CD install, could have triggered the reboot?

There is FAST (File and Settings Transfer wizard), but I don't know if
it supports disk to disk transfer. That would be one way to transfer
the programs. I've never tried it myself.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/293118

Otherwise it might be easier to move the machine to a location
that has networking.

*******

You could try "moninfo" from entechtaiwan.com, to get the EDID
table from the monitor. And from that, figure out what resolution is
native. There may have been a driver already in WinXP for the
MX400, which is why you had resolution choices in the first place.
With a newer video card (and no driver except the fallback VESA
driver), you might have ended up stuck at 800x600.

http://www.entechtaiwan.com/util/moninfo.shtm

Paul

 

[dadiOH]

In short, I'm now dead in the water and getting desperate! Any
suggestions would be warmly welcomed please.

I've read most but not all of the thread.

If it were me, I would...
1. put back an image if I had one; if not...
2. reinstall XP over the top; if not fixed...
3. wipe it and reinstall XP; if the problem continued; THEN try to track
down a hardware problem...that can be difficult as there are so many
possibilities...power supply, drive(s), cables, CPU, mobo. Better to take it
to a shop for that IMO.

--

dadiOH
____________________________

Winters getting colder? Tired of the rat race?
Taxes out of hand? Maybe just ready for a change?
Check it out... http://www.floridaloghouse.net

 

[Terry Pinnell]

There is FAST (File and Settings Transfer wizard), but I don't know if
it supports disk to disk transfer. That would be one way to transfer
the programs. I've never tried it myself.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/293118

Otherwise it might be easier to move the machine to a location
that has networking.

*******

You could try "moninfo" from entechtaiwan.com, to get the EDID
table from the monitor. And from that, figure out what resolution is
native. There may have been a driver already in WinXP for the
MX400, which is why you had resolution choices in the first place.
With a newer video card (and no driver except the fallback VESA
driver), you might have ended up stuck at 800x600.

http://www.entechtaiwan.com/util/moninfo.shtm

Paul

Thanks, duly downloaded.

 

[Terry Pinnell]

Did you run memtest yet?

No, too much else to do! And I don't think memory really seems an issue,
do you?

BTW, just realised I presumably need to install XP SP1 and SP2...

One new puzzle is that when I connected a USB flash memory stick (same one
used many times in same socket before the XP re-installation) I had a
message telling me I was using a high speed USB device in a low speed
port, and that there were no high speed ports on the PC. Why would I not
have been getting that before?

 

[Terry Pinnell]

I've read most but not all of the thread.

If it were me, I would...
1. put back an image if I had one; if not...
2. reinstall XP over the top; if not fixed...
3. wipe it and reinstall XP; if the problem continued; THEN try to track
down a hardware problem...that can be difficult as there are so many
possibilities...power supply, drive(s), cables, CPU, mobo. Better to take it
to a shop for that IMO.

Thanks. As per my update a couple of hours before, I'm now working in a
fresh version of Windows XP Home.