Recovery Console woes

[Stan Brown]

Apologies for the length of this article. I'm trying to include the
information that may be relevant, including exact error messages.

Acer notebook, Win XP Pro, SP2 I have a "Recovery disk" but no Win
XP disk. Recovery Console is installed.

Here's whereit started: Tonight I powered up and got just a black
screen. So I powered down and then powered up again. This time I
got "Windows did not start successfully." I picked Last Known Good
and booted successfully.

Googling I found the suggestion to run MSCONFIG, select the
BOOT.INI tab, and CheckAllBootPaths. So I did that, and got the
message

It appears that the following line in the BOOT.INI file does not refer to a valid operating system:
"C:\CMDCONS\BOOTSECT.DAT="Microsoft Windows Recovery Console" /cmdcons"
Would you like to remove it from the BOOT.INI file?

I chose No but thought I'd reinstall Recovery Console. To do this I
used the command

c:\i386\winnt32.exe /cmdcons

When I did this I got the message

The option to upgrade will not be available at this time because Setup was unable to load the file
c:\i386\WINNTUPG\NETUPGRD.DLL
The system cannot find the file specified.
OK

The WINNTUPG subfolder isn't there, all right, and yes I have "show
hidden files and folders" selected. I'm pretty sure that I didn't
get that message the first time I instaled Recovery Console. I
clicked OK, and the install of Recovery Console proceeded.

I tried MSCONFIG again and got the same "invalid operating system"
message. I tried rebooting into Recovery Console and it seemed to
work fine.

My questions:

(1) Is that "invalid operating system" about Recovery Console just
a spurious message to be ignored? (I was able to bot Recovery
Console and do a DIR of c:\WINDOWS.)

(2) What means that message about not being able to upgrade?

(3) Anything I can or should do about that black screen on power-
up? I happened once a couple of weeks ago but since then every time
I've powered up I've booted normally.

Additional data: The only thing even slightly dicey that I can
imagine I did before my last power-off was this:

The current PC Magazine mentions this and gives a work-around. (Feb 22
cover date, pg 56-57, and probably on pcmag.com)

Instructions are to:

Start | Run | secpol.msc
expand security settings -> local policies > Securities options

Scroll down to Recovery Console: Allow Floppy copy and access to all drives and folders,
double click and enable.

Of course you have to do this _before_ you have a problem. I just did
this on an XP box and seems to have worked. Of course I won't know
unless this machine screws up.

When I tried secpol.msc I got

The Group Policy security settings that apply to this machine could not be determined.
The error returned when trying to retrieve these settings from the local security policy database
(%windir%\security\database\secedit.sdb) was: The parameter is incorrect.

All local security settings will be displayed but no indication will be given as to whether or not a given security setting
is defined by Group Policy.
An local security setting modified through this User Interface may subsequently be overridden by domain-level
policies.

N.B. I set the computer up as workgroup; I'm not on a domain.

 

[Stan Brown]

Further info:

Today when I turned it on it booted to the blue screen "Shutting
down to prevent damage to your computer" -- there was more text but
it disappeared before I could read it.

When it rebooted itself it said it needed to check C for errors, of
which it didn't find any. Then the boot finished normally.

I did a full virus scan and Symantec (mandated by our network
administrator) found no threats, even checking for expanded
threats.