XP reboots funny after Windows Update

[William B. Lurie]

I have XP on my Master drive and also on my Slave drive.
While running on slave drive, it decided to go for an
automatic set of updates....and when it got done downloading,
it went ahead and installed and told me it had to reboot.
Nothing out of the ordinary there.

However, on bootup, it gets to where it flashed by like "Boot from CD"
but there's no CD so it should go for hard drive. Except now it stops
in a DOS-prompt with this message:

Type the name of the command iterpreter (e.g., C:\windows\command.com)

or something like that, and I have found no way for it to continue,
nothing I
can do except Ctrl-Alt-Del reboot, and then back to that same prompt....

H E L P!!!!

William B. Lurie

 

[William B. Lurie]

HELP!!! That hard drive is useless unless one of you kind MVPs
tells me how to get it back into service....
HELP!!!
WBL

 

[Ron Martell]

I have XP on my Master drive and also on my Slave drive.
While running on slave drive, it decided to go for an
automatic set of updates....and when it got done downloading,
it went ahead and installed and told me it had to reboot.
Nothing out of the ordinary there.

However, on bootup, it gets to where it flashed by like "Boot from CD"
but there's no CD so it should go for hard drive. Except now it stops
in a DOS-prompt with this message:

Type the name of the command iterpreter (e.g., C:\windows\command.com)

or something like that, and I have found no way for it to continue,
nothing I
can do except Ctrl-Alt-Del reboot, and then back to that same prompt....

H E L P!!!!

William B. Lurie

That message you are getting about the command interpreter is from the
Windows 9x system files and not from XP. So it appears that the
system files have been replaced or corrupted in some way.

A Repair Install of Windows XP would fix this. See
http://michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm for detailed
instructions.

Good luck




Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"The reason computer chips are so small is computers don't eat much."

 

[Kent W. England [MVP]]

I wouldn't go so far as to repair XP, but I would run Recovery Console
and repair the NT boot loader. Both work (AFAIK), but repairing the boot
loader is more focused and risks less damage to your Windows install.

Boot from the CD and select the first repair option. This is the
Recovery Console.

a new partition boot sector to the system partition.

"fixmbr \Device\HardDisk0" repairs the master boot record of the boot
disk. Run "map" first to verify the device where the MBR is located.

"bootcfg /list" to show OSes in boot.ini and "bootcfg /scan" to check
the disks for installed OSes. "bootcfg /rebuild" to fix the boot.ini
file.

That should do it unless you get a "ntldr is missing" error, which means
you need to copy ntldr and ntdetect.com from the CD in \i386 folder to
C:

 

[William B. Lurie]

Kent, we may have to modify our approach. I installed that hard
drive as slave and looked at it from the Master drive's XP. Its
Slave XP partition appears to be intact....Windows Explorer
shows me everything I expect to be there. As Drive 'G'......
But on the Slave drive, the 'D' partition appears to be seriously
corrupted. The 98 system doesn't appear to be there, and I'm afraid
I will have to reformat that partition and start all over with 98. Unless
you have an alternative (which I'd surely prefer), can you tell me how
to reformat that partition alone? Remember that if I juggle the
overall system so that the questionable drive is the Master or Single,
I haven't yet found a way to boot up at all.
Thanks...
WBL

 

[Kent W. England [MVP]]

You might need to "initialize" the damaged partition in compmgmt.msc, or
the MBR on that disk is damaged and doesn't list that partition.

You can also boot a DOS floppy such as a w98 diskette and have a look at
that w98 partition, assuming your MBR is intact.

Unfortunately your description is too vague to fully understand your
hard drive setup.