Try to solve this crazy problem

  • Thread starter Thread starter Wayne Stearns
  • Start date Start date
W

Wayne Stearns

Ok, I have been searching high and low for a fix to my
problem. Naturally it has been unsuccessful...Anyway,

I was trying to delete my Windows XP Home Edition so I
edited the boot.ini. Unfortunately after I did this, I
could not find my Windows XP Professional Edition CD! So
now I have no OS and can't boot up anything. Well, it
turns out that I have a damn laptop with no floppy drive,
so I can't make the floppy backups. Is there anything I
can do AT ALL to get back on the right track? I'm
racking my brain over here...thanks
 
First, what in the world made you think that was the way to accomplish
anything?

An XP CD is bootable, home or pro. Set your BIOS to first boot to CD. Insert
the CD and reboot. That is, after you disconnect anything you may have
hooked to the "Damn" laptop. Follow the instructions for a clean install
from the following site.
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html
Thanks to Michael Stevens

LOL, JAX
 
Jax,
Wayne never said (well, at least in this message) that he has the XPH CD -
since it is a laptop, it probably has a preinstalled OEM XPH. So, I assume
he only has the XPH installed in a notebook w/o a flopyy drive, but w/ a CD
drive, and wants to repair his XPH installation but he cannot boot to XP or
run a bootcfg.

Wayne,
you need some utility CD to load a command.com and then open and undo the
changes you made in the boot.ini - I bet you do not have a backup of the old
one :). If you ever make it to a command prompt, try fdisk /mbr - you never
know how you can get lucky. See http://www.xxcopy.com/xxcopy33.htm
If you have some startup XPH, find an USB floppy drive and try to install it
in BIOS as you boot device. Alternatively, since notebooks HDD's are easily
swapable, swap your HDD in a notebook w/ a floppy drive and take it from
there.

Otherwise, install DOS and try to navigate the HDD to change that boot.ini.

Of course, an XP CD would be your best bet to access the files.
Michael
 
Hi Phillips,

Please read my other post. I was sleepy and read over the part where he
clearly stated that he did not have the disk.

JAX
 
Wayne Stearns said:
Ok, I have been searching high and low for a fix to my
problem. Naturally it has been unsuccessful...Anyway,

I was trying to delete my Windows XP Home Edition so I
edited the boot.ini. Unfortunately after I did this, I
could not find my Windows XP Professional Edition CD! So
now I have no OS and can't boot up anything. Well, it
turns out that I have a damn laptop with no floppy drive,
so I can't make the floppy backups. Is there anything I
can do AT ALL to get back on the right track? I'm
racking my brain over here...thanks
Click to expand...

I suggest that you buy a USB-floppy drive. I'm pretty sure
that the BIOS of the notebook computer supports the USB-floppy
as one of the boot options. If so, you can use a boot diskette
to gain control of your system. If you have a FAT32 partition,
all you need to do is to get hold of a Win98SE boot diskette
which will treat the volume as C: drive and edit the BOOT.INI
file directly. If not, you need to create a boot disk
for XP as explained in the XXTB #33 (http://www.xxcopy.com/xxcopy33.htm).

You should go out and by the USB-floppy at any computer
store. Usually, it costs $50 or so. The cheapest place
to buy it in my recent research is DELL.com.

http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?sku=509210&cs=19&c=us&l=en

I bought it for $25.15 (after 10% discount) just a few
days ago and delivered it today.

The FAT32 case will be easier but NTFS case can be handled if
you make the Quick Boot Diskette as shown in XXTB #33.
In this case, you may have to use some XP system to create the
boot diskette. Since such a diskette will not have any
specificity to the disk geometry, you can create a boot disk
using another XP computer (on the other hand, if you try to
include the BOOT.INI option for recovery console, you will
not suceed because it needs the BOOTDISK.DAT image which
contains the disk geometry info inside). The beauty of
the diskette-based boot method is that the boot diskette
will provide the necessary components that would otherwise
be supplied by the disk, MBR, the Boot Sector and
a few key files in the root directory (NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM
and BOOT.INI). As long as the partition table has not
been destroyed and the \Windows directory is intact,
the boot diskette should be able to bring your XP back
into life.

One simple way to restore the self-bootability of the
disk you may try XXCLONE

http://www.xxclone.com

it has the feature to restore the self-bootability
(the /REPAIR option) which is simpler to run than
to use the recovery console.

At any rate, you may try to save money by not getting
the floppy drive for notebook. But, a USB-floppy is
still an indispensable device in case of problems.

Kan Yabumoto
 
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