Use Windows Recovery Console from XP CD

If you've experienced a blue screen on a reboot, chances are something got corrupted on your HDD, or your HDD went bad. If the former, read on, if the latter the following won't help... you'll need to contact a data recovery service.

Steps

  1. You've probably got in your hands some recovery/restore CD's from your PC vendor. BEWARE. For example, Fujitsu laptop CD's are only used to restore the HDD to its original factory state! Fuji will not give you a XP CD to 'recover' the hard disk, only to 'restore' it. Nice huh?
  2. Go out and purchase a Windows XP retail CD package. Well, yes, it's expensive, but better than having to use the OEM's restore CD and lose all your data.
    • IMPORTANT: if you've got Windows XP SP2 installed, you CANNOT use a Windows XP SP1 CD. The recovery console from the SP1 CD will not accept even the correct admin password when run on a Windows XP SP2 HDD. You must run the recovery console from a modern SP2 CD, then you'll be able to correctly login to your Windows XP install on the HDD.
  3. Pop in the Windows XP CD, reboot, making sure to select boot from the CD option. On some PC's you'll have to hit DEL on reboot to enter the BIOS and select boot from CD ROM. Other PCs you hit F12 while booting up.
  4. Windows XP will start to load. Eventually you will be prompted to select between Setup Windows and Repair Windows. Hit 'R' for Repair Windows. The RC (Recovery Console) will look for existing Windows XP installs to repair. Usually you have just the one, listed by the RC after it has scanned your disk, so type '1'. If the RC doesn't find any Windows Installs...you're in trouble. Note: Windows RC can find a Windows install when Windows Setup can NOT find one, so the RC seems more low level and reliable.
  5. Usually your admin password is blank, so just hit a return when prompted for a password.
  6. Type 'help' for the commands that the RC can run. You won't be able to access any folder other than C:\Windows and C:\ top level. The next two steps are probably only safe if you have a single partition on the whole disk.
  7. Try 'fixboot'. This re-writes the boot record.
  8. Try 'fixmbr'; again, this may damage a partition table that it doesn't understand, so be wary of taking this step... you may want to use this as a last resort and only if you have a single partition on the disk.
  9. Run CHKDSK /P C:
  10. If you get errors still, rerun or also do a CHKDSK /R C:.
  11. If the CHKDSK finally succeeds without errors, then you should be able to exit from the RC and reboot OK.
  12. Run CMD
  13. TYPE "HELP" to view the commands.
  14. Choose from the list displayed.



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