XP Pro Attempt to Repair

[hart0225]

Recently I had a client whose machine which was installed with XP Pro had a brain fart. It had been having infrequent problems and would just boot in the middle of an application. The system would restart and things would be back to normal.

However, the last time when it restarted, it booted to a login screen with Client as the user name (uh-oh). Normally it just booted directly without requesting a username/password. They clicked on OK and it continued without a password. But then, it gave an explorer error message "The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0150002). Click on OK to terminate the application". When I went to site, I booted from their OEM supplied Windows cd and ran scandisk with the /f option. It ran for a couple of hours completing normally however we were still not able to boot. So I removed the HD and attached it to our service drive and saw that their regular login profile was not there. I then ran our file undelete sotware and was able to recover to my local hard drive most (if not all) of their data but the folder structure had been messed up and ended up with 5,000 or so folders with their info scattered throughout those folders.

When I returned their drive to the original machine in order to reload windows, I now get the following message after booting from the CD: "Line 1 of INF file \$WIN_NT$.~BT\winnt.sif is invalid. Setup cannot continue. Press any key to exit." Is the file it is referring to on the hard drive, CD or where? I tried a different CD thinking the cd may have been corrupt but get the same error and assume that it is referring to the c drive.

At any rate, I am stuck and wonder if anyone can offer a suggestion to get their machine functional again?

Thanks

- Hart.

[mongo66]

The winnt.sif file is an unattended setup answer file. Windows XP setup reads this file automatically (if it's on the cd) and copies it to the hard drive during text mode setup. Perhaps you could post this file so we can take a look at it.

[hart0225]

Good morning. Sorry for the delay in answering. When I searched the drive for this file, I tried to open it using notepad but it appears to be corrupt. I have uploaded it here but renamed winntold.sif. I will also upload another file on the drive with .sif extension.

Thanks.

winntold.sif

[hart0225]

The other .sif file.

Edited November 17, 2008 by hart0225

[hart0225]

hmm, the file exceeds the 200k limit. I have opened the file using notepad and have attached a subset here.

txtsetup.sif

[medicsix]

Don't mean to butt in here but what I've done in the past to retrieve info from a corrupted OS is to boot to the XP disk and install a system over the original, not a repair but a second OS on the same partition, it will warn it's not a good idea but I go ahead anyway. You end up with two sets of files but you can access the old files to retrieve your valued files such as pictures or music. This is usually a last resort for me.