Power failure, XP won't boot.

XP service pak 2. Acronis TI ver 10.

As I was backing up my home pc to my xtrnl hd, the power went out. Now XP won't boot, not even in safe mode. I tried the option on the boot up menu that says something like "Use last known good configuration". It always does the same thing - it gets to the xp startup screen , the one with the progress bar, and it then reboots.

I used my acronis disaster disk to boot up and all my hd partitions appear. Of course the backup file is corrupt. I don't have a good backup file, and I could lose everything.

Any help on getting XP to boot would be greatly appreciated.

 

You should at least save your data files (applications and the OS could always be reinstalled) by using a BartPE cd. This is a bootable CD with a Windows Explorer-like GUI. You can copy your data to your external drive.

If you have your Windows installation cd, you could try a Repair install.

 

Before you do a repair installation or anything else. Do a chkdsk c:/f on the system partition.

Whenever you have a abnormal shutdown when the hard drive was in the process of reading or writing, some of the system files might have got corrupted. This can easily be fixed with a simple "chkdsk" , this problem has occur to me more than once and chkdsk has always fixed the problem.

This is one of those times where a "bartpe" bootcd will come in handy, it can do a chkdsk quite easily from the command prompt.

If the chkdsk doesn't fix it, and your computer still reboots at the logon screen. I can suggest other fixes because that descrepency sounds familiar to me and I have ideas on how to fix that.

I think your problem can be fixed without a "reformat" or "repair installation", especially if you have the NTFS files system (which is more robust to being repaired following data corruption).

 

How do I get to a command prompt? I don't have the xp os cd's because I have an oem version that came with the computer. Is it still possible to create a bartpe disc?

 

Do you have a spare hard disk that you could borrow? If so, remove your main disk and replace it with the spare. Try restoring your backup file to the spare. The "corrupt" indication may be a false positive. If the restore is successful and the PC boots then it will give you confidence to try a restore to your main hard disk.

 

I have another computer here and I was able to create a BartPE boot disc with that. Chkdsk c: /f seemed to fix everything.
Thanks everyone.

 

Nice work.

If anything like this happens again to you or someone you know, boot from the TI Rescue CD and try to make a backup image of the hard drive. Sure, it won't boot, but the idea is not to restore the whole image but to mount it (or explore it) to recover the data files after you get the system running.

Once you have made that image, you can try various things to get the system working. If they are successful, you can just erase that backup. However, if they fail and you make things worse, you will have the backup for data recovery.

Even if you have to reformat the drive or restore the OEM image to put the system back to the way it was when it was delivered, the data files can still be recovered from the backup image of the unbootable disk.

 

Ah, good advice. I guess I should of tried to do a backup using the TI boot disc before trying anything. Thanks.