My Windows XP is really messed. Please help.

[rAOL]

I was trying to turn on my computer today and it said "ntldr is missing". So i tried to boot with the windows xp cd, and i went to the recovery console to copy the ntldr and ntdetect.com from the cd to the c:. And when I rebooted it stil said it was missing. So i tried fixboot and that didn't work. I tried to reinstall windows xp over itself but it says the partition is full and in order to install it I have format the partition meaning i'll lose all my files, which I cannot have. So i tried to boot it with a windows xp boot disk to maybe try copy all my important files out but the windows xp boot disk didn't work. So I used a Windows 98 boot disk and now it seems whenever I reboot my computer it goes into windows 98 and just goes to a screen with the c:\ where i can access cd rom and floppy but not any files on my C:\.

I don't know what to do, I just wanna reinstall windows xp but it won't lemme do it without formatting the partition, but I can't lose my files. Does anyone know what i could do?

[mattofak]

are you sure that your bios is set to boot from the hard disk? sometimes it gets switched... also, to reinstall windows, my recomendation is to delete the C:\Windows directory, and the C:\Program Files directory, that should free up some space and wont delete any personal files...

[lockedon]

If you have another hard drive lying around install Windows XP into the new drive.

After the install plug in the drive with the bad Windows XP and you should be able to see your files on the other drive.

Hope that helps

[Tsunami]

I believe you should use fixmbr instead of fixboot to get ntldr back.

[rAOL]

I can't access my files though. I don't know if they all got deleted somehow or what, but I don't think they did cause my partition doesn't have any space to reinstall windows.

How can I get this installation of windows 98 off that installed when i put in the bootdisk as well? And is there any way of just installing windows xp over the previous version without manually deleting the files?

and does anyoen know what winnt.exe does on the windows xp disc?

thx

[raskren]

There's a few things that could be amiss here:

Boot.ini is incorrect or missing - not sure if recovery console tools will fix this or not.

The MBR is corrupt - fixmbr should repair this

You're bios setting are incorrect - i.e. they're set to boot from HDD-1 when HDD-0 is the bootable device

If you're good with DOS/Windows and feeling adventurous, you could put together a DOS boot floppy with NTFS support (assuming XP is on an NTFS drive). You could then verify your boot.ini settings and the presence of your NTLDR file.

You could also do a "repair" installation of Windows if your CD contains the same Service Pack level as the installed one - if SP2 is on your computer then you could repair using an XP CD slipstreamed with SP2. The repair rebuilds the boot information, reinstalls hardware, and replaces any files in the target install location that differ from the CD.

[jrf2027]

I haven't ever used it myself for this purpose, but there's a Linux distribution called Knoppix which can be booted fully from a bootable CD-ROM. Once you've started your computer using Knoppix, it will be able to read your NTFS partitions. You can use it to, first, verify that your files still exist and, second, if they do, transfer them to another drive or burn them to a CD.

Once your files are safely backed up, you can do whatever you want.

Another alternative is to get a second hard drive and install Windows on that. When you install Windows, don't have your first drive plugged in. Then, after Windows has installed correctly, plug in your first drive and start it up. It may need to verify that the first hard drive is good, and it may take a while to check. This did help me rescue a friend's data files.

[rAOL]

Does it only read the NTFS partition or can it read a FAT partition as well, cause i'm pretty sure my files are on a FAT partition.

[raskren]

NTFS is pretty much read-only with Linux. Linux can read and write to FAT 12/16/32 with ease.

You should use NTFS with Windows XP.

[jrf2027]

Ditto what raskren said. It can read NTFS, read and write FAT.

Sounds to me, though, like your hard drive is running NTFS, if you can't access c:\ from a Win98 boot floppy disk.

But yes, if you have any FAT partitions on your drive, or in your computer, you will be able to copy all your vital files to that partition.

On the other hand...if it's not Windows that is corrupt, but your hard drive's boot sector is, your only option may be to boot a clean Windows install on a second hard drive, then try to fix the boot sector problem on the first with that. Like I said, it worked for me to rescue data from a friend's disk when I did it that way.