XP STALLS

[Guest]

I asked this before but got no response I can find. My XP home starts to
boot up to the welcome screen but the welcome screen stays grey and does not
boot in. I have lost the cd drive and cannot put in my XP restore disc. Upon
investigation I get the message 'invalid media type reading drive C:' and
'command.com missing.
I can boot to a: but cannot boot from there into c: or d: or e: I just get
the message invalid command. Do I need a new hard drive or what???????????

 

[Patrick Keenan]

I asked this before but got no response I can find. My XP home starts to
boot up to the welcome screen but the welcome screen stays grey and does
not
boot in. I have lost the cd drive and cannot put in my XP restore disc.
Upon
investigation I get the message 'invalid media type reading drive C:' and
'command.com missing.
I can boot to a: but cannot boot from there into c: or d: or e: I just
get
the message invalid command. Do I need a new hard drive or
what???????????

The message "invalid media type" indicates a damaged partition table.

Yes, it's possible that the drive has failed, or has otherwise been badly
corrupted.

There is *no* way that you will get a message of "command.com missing" in an
XP install. Command.com is a file used in DOS and Win9x, and not present
in any version of NT or XP.

If you were getting such a message, it would indicate that an attempt was
made to partition and perhaps format the disk using a win9x floppy, or a
failed implementation of a multi-OS system.

The short story is that if there is any data on that drive that you wanted
to have any hope of ever recovering, yes, get a new hard disk. Remove the
current one, set it aside, install the new one and install XP and all apps
to it. *Then* you can consider data recovery from the old drive.

Booting from the A drive with a Win9x or DOS Boot floppy will usually be of
no value in this context, because most XP hard disks over 40 meg are
formatted NTFS, which those floppies cannot read.

I'm not sure what you mean by "have lost the CD drive".

HTH
-pk