Can't boot to WIN XP SP2 CD?

[John P]

My computer started acting weird - NAV 2005 would not load at start up. I tried uninstalling Norton Systemworks 2005 - couldn't uninstall or reinstall it. Loaded trial version of Kapersky and everything started moving like molasses. Uninstalled Kapersky and then at boot up I got "NTLDR is missing" error message.

Searched google and found how to repair it from Repair Console but now I can't boot to the WIN XP SP2 CD (it works fine in another machine) - it hangs when it gets to the initial blue Windows Setup screen - it never gives me the gray dialog bar at the bottom. I tried moving CD-ROM from secondary slave to primary slave and still no go. I'll try secondary master when I get home and perhaps try a different CD-ROM. If that doesn't work I'll take my main hard drive out, stick it in another computer, run NAV on it and try to replace the NTLDR and ntdetect files.

I also tried booting to a floppy to transfer the files but I could not "see" my hard drive to copy to.

All in all I had a fun Sunday.

Anything else ya'll would try?

 

[Hyperlite]

with all those failures, it sounds as though it may be a motherboard or power supply issue. if you can manage to get into the recovery console and see your drive, run chkdsk first thing. that has fixed so many of my problems like that one. Though with the drive not working, i still think it may be the motherboard. odds arn't very good that the cd drive coincidentally failed. is it an SATA hdd?

 

[John P]

i still think it may be the motherboard. odds arn't very good that the cd drive coincidentally failed. is it an SATA hdd?

Could very well be, I have had a few instances in the past several months where it took me several tries to get the computer to boot up. I have tried different power supplies.

Dang, like I need to spend more money now....

 

[dullard]

In my experience, Win XP always hangs when installing onto a drive with NAV on it (Blue screen of death for me). It frustrated me for a long time too. I eventually manually deleted enough of NAV to get Windows XP to install.

If I recall correctly, there was even a Microsoft web page about the inability to reinstall with NAV on the drive. It wasn't helpful, it just said to uninstall all virus scanners first.

 

[GregMal]

There are extensive manual uninstall instructions for NAV on the Symantec web site.
I'm not sure about uninstalling thru DOS commands though.........

 

[imported_Raze1]

I had this problem last week and was able to fix it. In my case, the file was deleted and I could not boot into safemode or anything.

The solution was simple, I needed to copy NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM from the XP Installation CD (Or a working XP machine) on to my hard drive.

In the best case scenario, I would have used my XP CD to boot my computer, then entered into the recovery console, then in the dos prompt, simply typed

COPY D:\i386\NTLDR C:
COPY D:\i386\NTDETECT.COM C:

Where D: is my CD drive letter. Once copied, I would have rebooted and I'd be up and running like normal again.

My problem was that I didn't have an XP CD.

After some digging I found a neat site http://www.webtree.ca/windowsxp/repair_xp.htm">here</a>. Since I had access to another computer with NERO, I was able to download this 7 MB ISO, burn it on a CD, and boot my system.

I also found the NTLDR and NTDETECT.com files somewhere online at BootDisk.com. If you have access to another XP machine, just enable viewing system files and copy the files from that machine to a floppy. The 2 files are hidden system files and are usually located in C:

To check, click Start>Run>type cmd>

then type

c:
cd/
dir /as
and you should see both those files so insert your floppy and type

copy c:\NTLDR a:
copy c:\NTDETECT.COM a:

and you're set. Hope this helps. I apologize if this is poorly organized but I'm in a hurry heh. GOOD LUCK!

------
edit 1:
The reason you couldn't see your drive when you booted to a floppy is because you probably used a classic Win98 boot floppy which works, but can't detect NTFS drives. Try making a new recovery cd like I stated and get the NTLDR and NTDETECT.com files from another source incase the ones you got are bad.

edit 2:
When I did this the first time, windows took FOREVERRRR to boot...I didn't wait so I booted into Safe Mode with Networking, ran Microsoft Anti-Spyware, and went to Trend Micro's Free Online Antivirus/Spyware Removal Tool, (also ran their CWS Shredder for shits and giggles) and also Hijack This! to clean my system as well as Internet Explorer. Several reboots later, my boots stopped hanging, and everything was working fine again.

edit 3: I had to disable Windows System Restore, otherwise I could boot into safe mode, but never finish booting normally. I never enabled system restore after that, but I ended up backing up my stuff and reformatting and doing a fresh install after finally finding my XP cd a week later hehe.

 

[Bozo Galora]

now how about that, quite a first post

 

[imported_Raze1]

I think my forgotten account was deleted from inactivity. Oh well.

 

[Bozo Galora]

i just KNEW you werent a newbie - lol

 

[John P]

Raze 1,

Thanks, I was able to boot to a Win XP CD in another machine and replace my files. Now I need to figure out why it happened in the first place and try to get stinking Norton Systemworks 2005 off my machine.

Edit: Systemworks 2005 unintstalled, Antivir installed. I tried trial version of Kapersky but with the Antivirus installed I could not connect to the internet. I looked at all the settings in Kapersky and couldn't figure out why it would block internet access. Anybody else know (I only installed the Kapersky Antivirus)? Oh well, Antivir will do for now.