M
Mike Faithfull
Long story ... Dell desktop Dimension 2400 running XP Home ... It appeared
to 'lose' a few files Saturday evening. I spent until the early hours of
Sunday morning searching for and downloading disk utilities with undelete
and file rescue programs (on a second PC so's not to alter anything on the
disc!) and had no success in finding the files which I thought I might have
accidentally deleted rather than 'lost' due to some technical problem.
Anyway, it was late and I was tired, so I left the PC powered up and went to
bed intending to resume the battle Sunday morning.
When I got back to it on Sunday, the screen was blank, and no amount of
mouse wiggling could coax it back to life again - CtrlAltDel could not
invoke Task Manager .. just nothing. So I hit the power switch, and after a
suitable pause, hit it again. Now, the system booted as far as the
'Welcome' screen, but there it hung. Again, the only way out was to turn
off the power. I repeated this cycle three or four times, but nothing
different happened. So, I decided to RTFM, found the original O/S CD (still
sealed in its envelope) and followed the instructions in the manual to
recover the system. I chose to 'repair' things 'cos I didn't want to
re-install XP completely and run the chance of losing more data.
Well, everything seemed to proceed as expected until the point where Setup
was "Completing Installation" according to the legend above the little
coloured bar - this was at a point where I could expect it to be finished in
25 minutes according to another message elsewhere on the screen.
Unfortunately it never got any further than that - listening carefully and
watching the indicator light it was clear that there was no disc activity
and the process had 'hung'. Again, the only way out was to hit the power
switch.
On re-applying power, the system was clever enough to realise that it was
part way through doing something fairly important and it told me "Setup is
restarting ...". Regrettably, it then followed the same route as before,
and hung again during the "Completing Installation" phase. And again. And
again. And again.
Oh, at some point - not sure where, it's getting a bit hazy now but it was
fairly early on in the proceedings - I did try to restore to a previous
'known good' configuration but that didn't work.
I've spent a good while researching the Microsoft support info and there are
many articles on 'Setup stops responding ...' but not at the 'completing
installation' stage, it seems. As a desperate final measure, I used the
Recovery Console to fix the boot sector on the disc and then to fix the
master boot record - which it reported as non-standard or corrupt. Seeing
that message filled me with hope that it would now boot happily, but still
nothing seems to be any different. Using the inbuilt facility I have run
hardware diagnostics on the CPU, memory and disc and all tests passed
without error.
I've made a bootable CD (Bart-PE) which provides a limited sub-set of
Windows functions, and I had intended to use it to copy the most important
files across a network connection to the other PC before re-formatting the
disc and re-building from scratch, but the program isn't able to install
networking for some reason ("Can't install network adapter"). I am able to
use the program to look at boot logs and setup logs on the hard disc, but
there's masses of data there, and I don't have the knowledge that would let
me recognise any particular failure message as being significant in the
contect of the present difficulty anyway!
I had thought of removing the hard disc and installing it temporarily as a
slave drive in the second PC, but the second PC is running Win98 and it
would not, I'm advised, be able to cope with the NTFS file system on the XP
disc.
So, before I finally give up and face the loss of precious data, please can
anyone suggest anything more I can try. Please?
Oh, and if this isn't really the best group to be asking this question,
please will you accept my apologies and point me in the right direction? Ta
much.
to 'lose' a few files Saturday evening. I spent until the early hours of
Sunday morning searching for and downloading disk utilities with undelete
and file rescue programs (on a second PC so's not to alter anything on the
disc!) and had no success in finding the files which I thought I might have
accidentally deleted rather than 'lost' due to some technical problem.
Anyway, it was late and I was tired, so I left the PC powered up and went to
bed intending to resume the battle Sunday morning.
When I got back to it on Sunday, the screen was blank, and no amount of
mouse wiggling could coax it back to life again - CtrlAltDel could not
invoke Task Manager .. just nothing. So I hit the power switch, and after a
suitable pause, hit it again. Now, the system booted as far as the
'Welcome' screen, but there it hung. Again, the only way out was to turn
off the power. I repeated this cycle three or four times, but nothing
different happened. So, I decided to RTFM, found the original O/S CD (still
sealed in its envelope) and followed the instructions in the manual to
recover the system. I chose to 'repair' things 'cos I didn't want to
re-install XP completely and run the chance of losing more data.
Well, everything seemed to proceed as expected until the point where Setup
was "Completing Installation" according to the legend above the little
coloured bar - this was at a point where I could expect it to be finished in
25 minutes according to another message elsewhere on the screen.
Unfortunately it never got any further than that - listening carefully and
watching the indicator light it was clear that there was no disc activity
and the process had 'hung'. Again, the only way out was to hit the power
switch.
On re-applying power, the system was clever enough to realise that it was
part way through doing something fairly important and it told me "Setup is
restarting ...". Regrettably, it then followed the same route as before,
and hung again during the "Completing Installation" phase. And again. And
again. And again.
Oh, at some point - not sure where, it's getting a bit hazy now but it was
fairly early on in the proceedings - I did try to restore to a previous
'known good' configuration but that didn't work.
I've spent a good while researching the Microsoft support info and there are
many articles on 'Setup stops responding ...' but not at the 'completing
installation' stage, it seems. As a desperate final measure, I used the
Recovery Console to fix the boot sector on the disc and then to fix the
master boot record - which it reported as non-standard or corrupt. Seeing
that message filled me with hope that it would now boot happily, but still
nothing seems to be any different. Using the inbuilt facility I have run
hardware diagnostics on the CPU, memory and disc and all tests passed
without error.
I've made a bootable CD (Bart-PE) which provides a limited sub-set of
Windows functions, and I had intended to use it to copy the most important
files across a network connection to the other PC before re-formatting the
disc and re-building from scratch, but the program isn't able to install
networking for some reason ("Can't install network adapter"). I am able to
use the program to look at boot logs and setup logs on the hard disc, but
there's masses of data there, and I don't have the knowledge that would let
me recognise any particular failure message as being significant in the
contect of the present difficulty anyway!
I had thought of removing the hard disc and installing it temporarily as a
slave drive in the second PC, but the second PC is running Win98 and it
would not, I'm advised, be able to cope with the NTFS file system on the XP
disc.
So, before I finally give up and face the loss of precious data, please can
anyone suggest anything more I can try. Please?
Oh, and if this isn't really the best group to be asking this question,
please will you accept my apologies and point me in the right direction? Ta
much.