Typical of many support functions.
Judicsious troubleshooting and analysis. What is your expertise level
and what tools do you have? If you're a neophyte, you may not be able
to do it. Are you certain the recovery disk doesn't have a "repair"
option in addition to installs?
No. If the repair feature works, some might remain, but one should
never, ever mess with repairs and installs to the OS without first
having completed a full backup which apparently you haven't done. You
might have to kiss your data goodbye and all the XP updates will need to
be reapplied, along with the SP's. BTW SP3 is available now.
If you will post some useful information, such as
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q555375 you ae a lot more likely to get
responses that will be more helpful.
What have you done to TS the issue so far? What have been the results?
What are the exact error messages and numbers you get, if any? Exactly
where/how does the failure occur?
Possibly, with a repair; NO with a full, clean reinstall of XP.
Your fastest route depends on whether you can get your data backed up
off the disk or are willing to lose it. Once you get going again, make
your next move be to learn to backup and then do so often.
HTH
Twayne
Ah, that makes things much clearer. I still can't help much but at
least it's clearer< g >. This might not help much but, based on your
comments here at least are some thoughts off the top of my head; Inline:
Got any other drives laying around, friends with spare drives, or a
friend that'd let you put your hard drive into their machine?
If you could ge ANY drive, even a tiny one of only a few Gigs,
installed as a boot drive it's prety likely you would be able to do some
recovery work.
For the near future: I'm not blaming this on SP3, but ... I am
starting to see some commonalities in the complaints about it,
which -might- indicate it has a problem or two.
Losing Update capabilities is one I've noticed with SP3 that shows
up more than others, and some of the more complex programs are seemingly
starting to have problems. But who knows, there are so many other
possibilities; just thought I'd mention it.
Ouch. Did any bootable CDs at all come with the machine? Or do you
have any other bootable CDs period? That would be one way to possibly
get at the Repair Console, if you're versed enough to use it. Minimum,
you might be able to run TI's recovery by booting from a different
drive, and just viewing/copying from the borked one. Or as a last
resort, chkdsk might be able to be run against the borked drive that way
too. It all dpends on having another drive to boot from.
Bootdisk.com has files to make bootable startup CDs for XP and fairly
good instructions to go with them. FWIW anyway.
Tsk, tsk, shame on you! :^}
Theoretically, maybe, some at least, IFF you do the correct upgrade
process. It's all a crapshoot, but an upgrade from Home to Pro wouldn't
be a bad thing IMO.
If money is an issue, you might achieve the same thing with Home if
you don't want the upgrade, but if you have the opportunity I'd go for
Pro simply because it's better for this kind of work and if you ever
wished you could use some of its networking features.
If money is not an issue, I'd recommend going for a full Retail
version of the software. Then you could easily and legally move it to a
different machine in the future should that opportunity present itself.
Depends on what you think of Vista, I guess. Personally I'm skipping
Vista and waiting to see what Windows Version 7 is all about.
Great: All you need now is to beg, borrow or (??) a drive and make it
bootable.
Hmm, even a friend's XP disk would make a temporary OS for the boot
disk. You won't be able to activate it, there might be some error
messages depending on how glued it is to the machine it came from, but
it would let you get at a lot of things until the timer expired for
activation.
I know this is unsolicited advice again, but the first thing I have
people do when they have to do clean installs is immediately, before
they even connect to the 'net, make a backup of the bootable drive using
ntbackup.exe that comes with both Home and Pro but isn't installed by
default on Home. Oops; forgot, you have TI; even better as long as
Shadow Copy is working.
If there are hidden partitions (for recovery) I have them make sure
they get those backed up, too. I have them burn those to a CD or DVD.
Then it's at least easy to get to "step 1" in reconstructing a boot
drive for the machine if it's ever needed.
Might be useful advice here: The second it starts to breathe, back
it up. Then you'll always at least be able to get back to that point if
your troubleshooting borks the system again. Can't tell you how many
times that's saved my own butt<g>.
FWIW, it actually sounds like buying a copy of XP and starting from
scratch is actually the fastest route for you. Troubleshooting things
like this can take months if you're not careful or get obsessed with
something.
N O T E
A word about chkdsk: Make running chkdsk with the /f or /r flags set a
last resort. It's not unusual for chkdsk, depending on the magnitude
and complexity of corruption, to make a disk totally unreadable. A lot
of people don't realize that and haven't come across it yet.
Regards, & good luck!
Twayne
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