XP froze during a disk defrag and now I cannot recover the system

[Guest]

I set my XP machine to defrag my hard drive while I went to bed. In the morning, I found that the system was frozen showing only 6% was defragged. The neither the keyboard nor the mouse had any affect on waking the machine up. Everything was very dead. So I turned the machine off. Perhaps a huge mistake. In anycase, it came back up part way with the message "Following file missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM. Use original setup CDROM and select "r" to start repair"

Well, I put in the cd but the machine just returned to the same message. Any keyboard action at all caused a reboot. back to the same place. I tried many things including: moving the drive to another computer to offload all the data files (a 98SE machine). This worked but was tedious. So I have the data. I also looked for a startup floppy for my XP machine but I don't think I ever had one. Been so long I have forgotten. Since I couldn't get an XP one up, I tried my 98SE startup disk to see if I could see my C drive. It started up and I could see the drive OK. I ran the hard drive on the 98SE machine and used Norton Disnk Doctor to fix up any problems. That tokk over 16 hours!!!!! and apparently fixed some problems. However, it still behaved the same on my XP machine. So I changed my bios to try booting from the CD ROM. However, no matter what I do, it seems to find windows 98 somewhere in ram to start booting from. It will not boot from my CD rom. How can I get rid of teh windows 98 stuff and force it to the CD

Have I screwed the pooch so much that my only hope is a disk reformat? I will still have that windows 98 on bootup problem I think

Anyway, I'm sure open to some ideas to try. It's been a wasted weekend

Thanks for anything you can offer

Gord Pop

 

[Kevin Muenzler]

If you have your original XP CD it is bootable. Set your BIOS boot order to
boot from the CD first. Then you can select repair.


--
Kevin Muenzler

I set my XP machine to defrag my hard drive while I went to bed. In the

morning, I found that the system was frozen showing only 6% was defragged.
The neither the keyboard nor the mouse had any affect on waking the machine
up. Everything was very dead. So I turned the machine off. Perhaps a huge
mistake. In anycase, it came back up part way with the message "Following
file missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM. Use original
setup CDROM and select "r" to start repair".

Well, I put in the cd but the machine just returned to the same message.

Any keyboard action at all caused a reboot. back to the same place. I
tried many things including: moving the drive to another computer to offload
all the data files (a 98SE machine). This worked but was tedious. So I
have the data. I also looked for a startup floppy for my XP machine but I
don't think I ever had one. Been so long I have forgotten. Since I
couldn't get an XP one up, I tried my 98SE startup disk to see if I could
see my C drive. It started up and I could see the drive OK. I ran the hard
drive on the 98SE machine and used Norton Disnk Doctor to fix up any
problems. That tokk over 16 hours!!!!! and apparently fixed some problems.
However, it still behaved the same on my XP machine. So I changed my bios
to try booting from the CD ROM. However, no matter what I do, it seems to
find windows 98 somewhere in ram to start booting from. It will not boot
from my CD rom. How can I get rid of teh windows 98 stuff and force it to
the CD?

Have I screwed the pooch so much that my only hope is a disk reformat? I

will still have that windows 98 on bootup problem I think.

 

[Guest]

First,before running defrag you need to run disk-cleanup first,the BIO
should be ok,you can always go to exit page,select,"load set-up defaults"
The xp cd is needed here,boot to cd,recovery,in recovery type:CHKDSK C: /
Or boot to cd,install xp,repair current copy.Either way,no xp utility should eve
run for more than 30-45 mins.,(most cases,normal user).

 

[Guest]

Kevin, I have put in what I THINK is my original setup CD. I have set my bios to boot from CDROM in all 3 places. Still no luck. It is finding Windows 98 from somewhere. No dubt left over when I tried to boot from my 98 disk. Wish I knew how to get rid of it

Thanks for your input

Gord

 

[Guest]

Thanks Andrew

Still can't get my system to recognize my CDROm as a place to boot from. I can read from it all right in dos mode. Just wont go there to boot from no matter what my bios says

Gord.