Help using TI 9!!

I have read on this forum that the WIN 98 boot disk works better for fixing the MBR, apparently it has 4 extra bytes (word?) that does a better fix then the XP fix. If the XP fix fails try a WIN 98 boot disk. I can't remember the command but I think it is "fdisk/mbr" a search in google will help you to find a boot disk you can download and directions. I sure hope you get your problem solved once and for all with no lost of Data.
( Then you can go back to being "mikeyatease" )
Keep us posted.

 

Thank you Thomas. That was truly a well-written piece. I followed the instructions precisely, except I was unable to specify the /F switch on CHKDSK, getting the message that the parameter was unrecognized. I then entered CKDSK /? to see that the only available switches were /P and /R. I then chose CHKDSK /R and followed the rest of the instructions. The result was unsuccessful, perhaps because the resident XP installation had itself never completed. Put another way, I successfully restored an unsuccessful installation.

 

One thing I found when using the directions in the article on a machine that wouldn't boot was that if ran BOOTCFG /Rebuild it did not work. I ran BOOTCFG /Add to find the windows installation and then repeated BOOTCFG /Rebuild and the machine started booting OK.

 

Well,
I am pretty confident now that I am truly at a loss. Here's what happened.

I ran Western Digital's disk software to check my boot disk: no errors. I then requested that it write 0's to the disk, thus destroying all data, and leaving me with a raw disk. I did this to ensure that there were no viruses and no bad settings.

I then began another clean install of XP. This install ended in the exact same manner as my previous clean install, which is to say that it ended in a blue/black screen, never seeming to have completed.

Removing the CD and then rebooting produced the same quick Windows XP logo followed by the blue/black screen.

The only thing I can think of at this point is that either (1) there is something wrong with the disk that even the diagnostics are not picking up or (2) there is something wrong with the XP installation CD.

 

mikeyatease, excuse this question, I see you went to Circuit city and bought another hard drive........One more thing, when I bought a new disk yesterday, I talked to an informed tech at Circuit City has this drive been installed yet or are you still trying the old one?
If you did and you are still having trouble you could be looking at the Cmos, or the motherboard. Maybe a bad cd/dvd rom drive is preventing your fresh install.
Did you try mounting your image at circuit city? Or even validating it? , like you thought you might try, just knowing you can mount it will give you some peace of mind, you will then know that some or all of your data can be saved once you are up and running again.
Also you have been inside your case, make sure all the cables to your drives are plugged in properly. Just out of curiosity, are your two internal hard drives on the same cable or different ones?

 

No, the new drive was never installed. I wanted to be sure there was no problem with the old drive before doing so. Even now, after having checked the old drive for errors using Western Digital diagnostics, I still don't know if the disk drive is the problem or if it is something else, as you imply by mentioning CMOS.

I gave up yesterday and brought the computer to Circuit City. I will let you know the status when I find out, which hopefully will be tomorrow.

 

A Summary:

Suspicions of faulty versions of TI,
Suspicions of bad sectors on your C:,
Windows install failing,
Inconsistent results verifying an image on D:
This has led suspicion away from TI.

and now:::
your floppy failed to boot too?

Just humour me will you please? Put on an antistatic strap, open up that case will you, check that the box is not full of dirt and crud which inhibits cooling, and that all cables are firmly in place?

Phil

 

Okay, an update is in order. Circuit City help was useless. Here is what I have written to Acronis support:

"Being unable to restore an Acronis Image, I have reinstalled XP, doing a full format of the C: drive. The install works its way all the way through GUI setup, attempts a finishing reboot to finally come up, displays the Windows logo briefly, and then the screen goes black.

I researched the web and came across a troubleshooting procedure, which I followed. I used the XP setup disk to get into Automatic System Recovery, thus getting a command prompt. I then inspected the files c:\windows\setupact.log and c:\windows\setuplog.txt.

Here are a few troubling things I noticed:

First, I see that there is an F: drive letter on my machine.(visible both in XP setup and in the above files). There was no such drive letter when Windows was running previously. Did Acronis create this? I once attempted to create an Acronis Secure Zone, but the operation failed. XP setup says that this partition is empty. It is troubling that the above mentioned log files are referencing this F: drive. Could this be a possible problem with my installation?
Should I go into XP setup and delete the F:?

Next, in the setuplog.txt file, I noticed copy and other operations (and numerous failed copy operations) taking place from drive D: to drive C:. Now drive D: is my (second) backup hard drive, and it is the repository for several Acronis images. My CD/DVD device (containing the XP install disc) uses drive letter E:
This makes me think that Acronis, which was installed when I began my XP install, is instructing the XP install to use some files on D: Is this possible?
I would think not, as by formatting C: when I began the install, one would think that Acronis would have been removed. Yet, I can see no other explanation but some kind of Acronis involvement. Does the MBR get overwritten? Is Acronis referenced in the MBR? How can I delete Acronis references in the MBR?
>From within the ASR program on the XP install, how can I delete any resident Acronis code? How can I ensure that Acronis will not interfere with a clean XP install."

and:


"I thought just now I ought to give an example of the above copy operation, and here is one:

d:\xpsprtm\base\ntsetup\syssetup\log.c,133,,F:\I386\mediactr.ca_ was copied to c:\windows\system32\dllcache\mediactr.cat

Notice here the references to "d:" (my backup disk containing Acronis images) and "F:" which is that empty partition I thought must have been created by Acronis to hold a secure zone. "


Now, for you helpful and cynical readers, maybe the takeaway will be (besides the fact that I have a lot to learn) is that Acronis can interfere with a clean XP install. Any comments, suggestions, help on this?

Michael

 

As you are doing a clean install, XP will as you say reformat the drive. I think your mystery drive is most probably the failed SZ partition.

Running DiskPart or deleting all partitions should clear that out of the way. If your machine is a brand name one, it is also possible that the manufacturers diagnostic or install partition are causing a problem.

Does your second drive, have a copy of XP on it and do you know if this is marked as an active drive?

It might be worth, temporarily disconnecting your second drive and see what drive letters and installation procedures XP comes up with then.

Did you make a rescue CD, and if so, can you boot from it?

Colin

 

Progress!! I have reinstalled XP. I did a full format of C: prior in order to remove 8 GB of unallocated space on C: (I was troubled as to why that 8 GB had not been included in the C: partition.)

The secret to success was to disconnect the power and data cables from my second SATA drive. This permitted XP setup to correctly copy all files needed in the installation; I saw no copy error messages. I then had to quick pull the XP CD out of the drive during the "rebooting" phase of the installation to prevent a looping situation from "34 minutes left" to "1 minute left."

Other issues remain of course. Thanks to all who have contributed to this solution.
Michael

 

Hi Michael thought we had lost you! ( I missed your December 28 post)
I hope you had a merry Christmas and I would like to wish you a Happy New year, Glad things are starting to piece together for you, you are a very persistent man....good for you.
I don't know if you read my thread I started. I reinstalled windows and each day I would add programs and copy an image and restore to my old image so I could keep using my computer with all the many programs on it.
I did this for two weeks ie: back and forth from newly installed image to the old. Whenever I couldn't find a needed driver, I would mount my old image and click "have disk" and point it to the mounted image. I finally have my computer running like a "lean mean machine" once again! I am keeping the latest image I just made in case I want to get back to this "lean mean machine" a bare bones one and I am also keeping an old image. One reason is when tax time comes along and I use my tax program, to save time filling out names,address, etc. I will simply point to last years tax in my old "mounted image".
Reinstalling windows cleaned out so many nagging problems! So for me True Image has been a Godsend. Good luck to you.
And thanks for the update.

 

Wow, if I said I followed everything that happened as was tried in this thread I'd be lying.

However, it made me think of something that comes to mind at various times when reading this forum. This is a general comment and certainly not directed to the participants of this thread.

A PC acts up in a serious manner for some unknown reason and the first thing we do is attempt to reinstall the OS or disk contents from an image. I don't know why we think this should work given the machine has an unknown problem and we all know that if the hardware isn't in perfect shape TI is likely to give corrupt archive messages or bomb out doing the restore. IMO, the more logical course would be to at least run chkdsk /r from the XP recovery console and memtest86+ for a few passes. This would give some confidence in the basic operation of the key parts before attempting to flog the disk and memory with TI.

Just a thought and no, I don't always practice what I preach!

 

Well, progress is good, but the end destination, as dbnox states "lean, clean machine" is still elusive.

dbknox: your method is logical and your application of it admirable. Good for you.

seekforever: Serendipity. Just yesterday I ran a Google search for memory testers. The reason I did this was that, though I can run programs, my computer is still not stable and I have come to suspect hardware, memory in particular.
There are random occurrences of shortcuts not working due to <no symbols> errors and an occasional blue screen crash. I have run chkdsk previously, and it found no errors. This makes me think that memory must be checked.

-Michael

 

Memory can certainly cause all sorts of "random" problems.

There is another thing that can be tried but it isn't something I'd recommend for everybody and it very likely would fix only a very few problems. This magic thing is to go in and reset the BIOS to default values just in case some system parameter is a bit out of whack. I always say that the default configuration is the one that gets the most testing be it BIOS, OS, application or hardware.

Good luck.

 

Hello Michael,

A well respected memory checking utility is Memtest86+ v1.65, available from www.memtest.org. Run it for a few hours (preferably overnight) and there shouldn't be any errors reported.

Regards

 

Good news, finally. I am back up. Here's what happened. I ran a Windows memory checker (from MS), simply because it was easier to understand than memtest. It gave no errors after 6 passes using the standard test suite: not really thorough I suspect. System instability persisted. I made backups of latest stuff in order to do a clean XP install.

By clean, I mean really clean: I removed three of four memory modules, disconnected second hard drive, and disabled nonessential components in BIOS.
XP install generated a blue screen crash during the install. I tried again from scratch and got another blue screen, this time with a different error message.

I searched both error messages on Google and found at the MS web page that the error is most often caused by memory. So I swapped out the single module for another and tried again. No problems at all, a clean install.

I installed chipset drivers, XP updates, and graphics drivers. Then I installed my second graphics adapter. Rebooted and found that I had four working monitors.

Anyway, I'm now in the process of reinstalling and reconfiguring the rig. I'm having one little problem that you all might be able to help me with.

On my backup drive, I cannot delete old Acronis disk images. I am not running Acronis and it is not installed. Windows Properties on these image folders does not show any settings for write protection or anything. The error message just says that access is denied. It's a bit mystifying; I'm thinking that somehow Acronis must have taken ownership away from anybody or any program except itself. I do have adminstrator privilege in Windows. Any ideas? My fallback position is to temporarily move other stuff I have on it and then reformat and maybe repartition the drive, thus deleting the Acronis images.

Thanks in advance. And thanks too for the many replies and suggestions for helping to climb out of the hole I've been in for the past nearly two months.

Back to being Mikeyatease again,
Michael

 

Back to being Mikeyatease again,
Michael
And a big sigh of relief!!!
Did you start a "secure zone" at one time? I suspect that this is the problem. Reformating the drive should get rid of it.

As bodgy said in an earlier post "As you are doing a clean install, XP will as you say reformat the drive. I think your mystery drive is most probably the failed SZ partition."

Do a search on "secure zone" in this forum and see what you find.
If you are going to reinstall windows, why not try restoring your old image with the rescue disk, just for the heck of. If you have one.

 

dbknox,
It's good to see your humor again. This time I join in heartily.

Yes, I did try to create a secure zone previously (seems ages ago). But there is no mystery drive anymore. That was elimated when I reformatted C:.

What I'm talking about here is a storage backup drive to which Acronis once wrote its images. I think it might be easier to reformat, and I have the space on C: to use as a temporary drive during the reformat. That's for tomorrow.

Michael

 

The access denied message could be because your new installation of XP will have changed the security identifiers that NTFS uses.

Boot into XP safe mode, hunt down the tib files, right click choose security and sharing.

Click on the secuirty tab, click on the advanced button. Highlight your logon for this installation. Make sure the little box at the bottomn of the form is ticked (inherit parent properties etc, then click on ADD.

When finished, OK out of all the forms - reboot and all should be fine.

The only problem will be if you have XP Home version, as I'm not sure how you get to the XP security stuff, as it won't show up.

Colin

 

Thanks for that, bodgy. I would have tried it had I not already reformatted D:.
However, I'm glad I did the reformat as it gave me the chance to set up partitions and to organize my work.
Michael

 

And I hope all is well now!!

I am leaving for a vacation in Arizona soon for a month or so, with all the work you did I will surprised, when I get back if I don't see mikeyatease "very frequent poster" helping others with their problems on this forum.
I know I sure learned from it.