I bet he's already reinstalling.

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#resist

I bet he's already reinstalling.

LOL...close.
I putzed around with DOS commands and SFC for a few hours.
Nothing would work right.

I booted from the CD and am now attempting a repair installation.

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

Oh my, but this is getting funner and funner....

Got the repair install going, but at a certain point in the 'installing devices' stage, I get a popup informing me that the software it is trying to install for my GTX590 'has not passed Windows Logo testing', strongly advises me not to use it, but do I wish to install it anyway.
Unfortunately, at that point in the install process, both the keyboard and the mouse which are attached through a USB adapter, quit responding. So I can't answer the question to continue.
Tried again, same halt at the same point.

I finally took a flier and attached a spare keyboard directly to the PS2 port on the mobo, and when the popup presented itself again, that keyboard would still respond.

Sheeesh, I do luv my Winders....LOL.

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

If you are going to replace the file, I suggest to not delete de corrupted file. Once you find it, just rename it so if the file is on bad disk sector that sector will not be used by the replacement file

You don't need to worry about that with any modern hard drive (i.e. most SMART capable drives). If the corruption occured because of an unreadable sector, this sector is marked by the hard drive firmware as "eventually bad" and will be checked on the next write attempt. If it fails again, it will be replaced by one of the spare sectors, neither the user nor the OS will notice that (or at least nothing more than an eventual short slow down).

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An old trick for getting Windoze to install was to remove the "offending" hardware for the duration of the install, then stick it back in and install its drivers later (and not a few reboots later....)


Good luck.

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

An old trick for getting Windoze to install was to remove the "offending" hardware for the duration of the install, then stick it back in and install its drivers later (and not a few reboots later....)


Good luck.

Yeah, may have to try that, but I am out of time and patience for today.
May yank both the GPUs and put in some very basic old thing to try to get through the recovery process. I should have some functional old dinosaurs around yet.

It's also getting too hot in here to continue trying right now.

Meowsigh.

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

Definitely one of those tasks not to be done when you are getting hot under the collar, or broiled by the sun.

Stay cool...

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

Why not simply disconnect the drive from the down machine, and connect it to an operational machine as a supplemental drive.

Then copy the data you want to the new drive using the tools on the functional operating system you have connected your faulty drive to.

You could also run diagnostic tools and antivirus scanning on the supplemental drive before trying to install the new version of the program.

This does make it possible to spread a virus or malware to an additional machine if the problem was due to malware. Whatever machine it goes to, I'd be sure that machine's antivirus is updated and dialed into maximum paranoia mode with heuristic checking, etc, and the first thing would be a full scan on that drive.

If you have long enough power and data connectors, you might not even need to physically disconnect the drive in order to connect it to a functional machine.

Don't try power from one machine and data from another. Power and data from the machine the drive is connected to is the safest way, even if you have to physically dismount the drive.

ATTN: Linux guys (and Mark) - you can find (discreetly) on the Web disk-based versions of Windows to perform the file copies from - it's usually called "Windows PE" - Pre-Install Environment - and there is one for Win 7 that I have d/l. The nice part is that it has a GUI, so no DOS commands need to be remembered.

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Well...
Perseverance pays off, I guess.
Rig has been recovered. But not without some grief.

Seemed to be having trouble running the repair install. Sometimes the bios would see the internal CD drive, sometimes not, transfers were very slow.
So I yanked power to that and plugged in my new USB DVD drive. That worked much better. So either the old drive is getting flaky or the interface on the mobo.

This time through, I told it NOT to install the GPU driver is wasn't liking, with the extra keyboard I still had attached. Update completed. Now XP would crash every time it booted. Tried safe mode again. This time safe mode launched OK. So I did a clean install of the Nvidia drivers from within safe mode. Rebooted. All clear, but rather slow.

Of course, then I had to do the Windows Update dance to reinstall Service Pack 2, and then over 120 other various updates. It's a rather long dance.

I also may have found the root of the initial problem...CPU overheating.
I happened to check the CPU temp, and found it to be 85c with no crunching going on. So I took the time to oil the cooler fan bearing and reseat the cooler with fresh MX-2 paste.
Now around 60c full load. The old paste had dried to a crumbly crust.

I suspect when things got rather warm in here last week, the failure was probably caused by an overheated CPU doing something wonky at just the wrong moment in time, corrupting the file.

All back up now. I'll be gone for a couple of hours, and if it's still running when I get back home, I think we're in the clear again.

And then I have to get off of my butt some day fairly soon and figure out that bit about making a recoverable copy of the OS with all updates applied, because once support for XP is withdrawn, if something like this happens and I can no longer use Windows Update to get the Service Pack and other updates, she's all done.

Thanks for all the advice and tips offered during my quest.

Mark

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

Such is the learning experience. If you hadn't have gone down that path you wouldn't have found the problem. At the end of the day SpeedFan will help diagnose on future occasions.

And then I have to get off of my butt some day fairly soon and figure out that bit about making a recoverable copy of the OS with all updates applied, because once support for XP is withdrawn, if something like this happens and I can no longer use Windows Update to get the Service Pack and other updates, she's all done.

Seriously take a look at the Acronis range of software. I bought a license for Acronis Migrate Easy to move from HDD to SSD - and I now use this for system backup. Included in Migrate Easy is a facility to clone drives - and it works well - really well.

I use the cloning facility to clone my Windows boot SSD to HDD periodically (I have BOINC installed on a separate SSD to my Windows boot SSD). If anything changes on my Windows SSD, I just clone to my backup HDD. With this setup, I can be back and running from a boot drive failure in less than a minute (assuming I'm around to tweak the boot order in the BIOS and re-connect the HDD cables) - with exactly the same settings as the last clone. I can then re-image the failed SSD from the backup HDD and its like nothing ever happened. Money well spent methinks...

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Yea Mark!

I've cursed that CA company more than once when I was trying to do something *simple* that they didn't want to let me do. I guess they don't want you taking an installation disk and go from machine to machine using the OS mid-install, getting a command prompt, and... somehow cheating them out of something. I still haven't figured-out what I could nefariously do, but there must be something.

Out on their website is a way to download SP3, no problem. The problem is that there is some hardware that won't install with SP2 and before installation disks. I made myself a SP3 CD and it's much, much quicker than waiting for the downloads.

But installing SP2 and earlier: BSOD, BSOD, BSOD...

Sounds like you were able to get around that. I had to do one of the suggestions you received (pull the video card / use the onboard video to install, then put the card back).

It's enough to make a grown man cry, or to use RAID 1 on all their machines.

Glad you got her back!

Glad to see you got it working Mark.

For anyone else or Mark who has similar problems of only being able to boot to a command prompt, and only being familiar with GUI than ZTreeWin could be the answer.

http://www.ztree.com/html/download.htm is based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XTreeGold which was around for many years in the DOS era.



ZtreeWin is usable as a 31 day trial version, then $29.95 to use it beyond the trial period.

[Edited IMG to fit in 1024 pixel screen width.]

I'm glad Mark got his rig running again. However...

(This won't actually help the Seti project at all, because I don't Boinc on the computer in question. But it's still knowledge I'd like to have and maybe next time I'll need it on a Boincing machine.)

Can someone run me -- slowly -- through using some sort of Linux, Ubuntu, whatever, to boot off of a flash drive? My crummy little netbook has only a few GB of flash memory as its hard drive. It's not even a recognizable SSD that I could pull out and connect to another machine, it's just a small board with some chips on it that connects to the motherboard with a ribbon cable similar to the one that connects the keyboard. Anyway, I somehow filled up the "drive" and it won't boot, even to Safe Mode DOS prompt. I'm thinking if I could boot off a flash drive, I could delete some files and give Windows room to do whatever it's up to (it was in the middle of an Update restart, then went into CHKDSK which is probably taking up unnecessary space).

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David
Sitting on my butt while others boldly go,
Waiting for a message from a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri.

Can someone run me -- slowly -- through using some sort of Linux, Ubuntu, whatever, to boot off of a flash drive?

I don't know if this is slowly, but you are computer savvy and don't mind using command line briefly, right? I'm assuming you would like instructions on getting Linux into an usb-stick.

1. grab an usb-stick, 1+ gigabytes
2. download an .iso of your favourite Linux distro
3. unpack .iso into the usb-stick (at least 7-zip and WinRar know how to read .isos)
4. depending on the distro the usb-stick should now have something like the following directories
\boot
\casper
\isolinux
etc.
5. copy \isolinux directory to \syslinux
6. rename isolinux.cfg file in \syslinux to syslinux.cfg
7. open the \syslinux\syslinux.cfg file and check if it mentions isolinux somewhere, if it does replace all of them with syslinux
8. download Syslinux
9. unpack Syslinux somewhere
10. in administrator Command Prompt window, run unpacked-syslinux-dir\win32\syslinux.exe (if you're on 64-bit Windows replace win32 with win64) with the following command line (u: is the usb-stick, replace with whatever you have):
syslinux -m -a -d syslinux u:
if it complains complains about directory append / or \ in front of syslinux or drop "-d syslinux" completely
11. set your netbook to boot from usb-stick, attach stick and reboot

Once the GUI is up the distro has hopefully set up icon(s) on the desktop that point to the SSD-thingy. If not, it may have Computer or Documents or something that you can use to start up file manager. If not, you'll need to find Start Menu equivalent and figure out what's the right item to choose.

Recent versions of Ubuntu use a modified version of Syslinux. If you pick Ubuntu you will likely see some error messages and you may need to press enter for the boot to continue.

Your favourite distro probably has less messier instructions in it's wiki. You'll just need to find them :/ Some distros may have Windows executable that knows how to set up an usb-stick. I don't remember if Ubuntu has one.

And finally, I didn't test these instructions. If it doesn't work tell what went wrong and I'll tell what to change.

There are also programs that will take a raw .iso and "make" a bootable thumb drive from it for you.

"universal USB installer"(download towards bottom of page) is one, it works with most distro's live CDs. and there are others.

I would run "universal USB installer" (windows executable), then just stick the USB thumbdrive into the computer in question and boot it... :-)



Thanks for your write up, very nice info.

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#resist

There are also programs that will take a raw .iso and "make" a bootable thumb drive from it for you.

"universal USB installer"(download towards bottom of page) is one, it works with most distro's live CDs. and there are others.

I would run "universal USB installer" (windows executable), then just stick the USB thumbdrive into the computer in question and boot it... :-)

Oh yes, I forgot about that one. Never used one myself though. I usually like to know how stuff works and since I already have the tools it's faster for me to do things myself rather than finding and downloading some GUI tool.

But anyway, either approach works. Choosing a distro is going to be a harder problem :)

Choosing a distro is going to be a harder problem

:-)

Ain't that the truth. My vote is for (Ubuntu-based) Mint(see green LM icon in my sig below), or plain Ubuntu if you like a radically different interface (Unity).

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#resist

Choosing a distro is going to be a harder problem

:-)

Ain't that the truth. My vote is for (Ubuntu-based) Mint(see green LM icon in my sig below), or plain Ubuntu if you like a radically different interface (Unity).

Running Mint 10 here.

Lets see if we can work out some kind of short list for N9JFE so he doesn't have to try all the distros available.

Ubuntu - if you want to try the new UI (or just see what so many complain about); I have only briefly tested some software on Ubuntu so I don't really have strong feelings either way of the new UI
Mint - Ubuntu under the hood and more traditional UI
Debian - stable version is ok for servers but has older software, I don't know how usable unstable and testing are

Of the RedHat land
Mandriva - I think ML1 runs this; I had a bad experience with this, but it may have had something to do with very unstable hardware I had at the time
Mageia - Mandriva fork, apparently ok and somewhat popular
Fedora - if you want to see what S@H staff is using

Since the machine in question is a "crummy little netbook" I think KDE might not be best option which rules out Mandriva and Mageia (if someone wants to correct me go ahead). Of course there are distros that are designed for netbooks and are lightweight but they may have lost some user-friendliness in the process.

So, I'd vote Mint 13 MATE.