XP Won't Install.

[druid]

My primary hdd died today. That's ok I had been expecting that and had moved most of the important data away. Ironically enough it's only the boot.ini and a DLL or two that are corrupt. I can still access most of the data from Linux (thank god I had it on another partition, otherwise I wouldn't be able to write this).

However when trying to run the recovery console (and install the OS on a new hdd) I ran into a strange problem:

Once I've booted from the XP CD and the blue loader has done it's magic (loads of device drivers loaded) it says more or less "Setup is starting Windows", then some cdrom access happens, my keyboard lights flash and go off, optical mouse led flashes....and then it dies.

Normally at this point I'd expect to see the EULA screen or partition selection etc but all I get is a black screen. I've tried pressing the keys that'd normally lead to System Recovery (enter, F8, R) but nothing happens. At this point I have to reset the computer.

Could someone tell what the hell is going on? This same hardware configuration has worked well before but now the setup just hangs before it even starts. :(

Is there a way to run chkdsk off a boot disk etc? I'd appreciate anything to get me forward with this.

:: EDIT :: All Windows partitions are NTFS.

[sagit]

Originally posted by druid
...

Is there a way to run chkdsk off a boot disk etc? I'd appreciate anything to get me forward with this.


can you run fsck from linux on the hdd?

i dont know if youre interested in this, but i saw an article the other day (slashdot probably), about making a bootable windows live system. might that help also?


EDIT: http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ <--- bootable windoze cd

[druid]

Originally posted by sagit
can you run fsck from linux on the hdd?

i dont know if youre interested in this, but i saw an article the other day (slashdot probably), about making a bootable windows live system. might that help also?

I'll try the fsck but I doubt it'll work for NTFS. I can't even mount the partition in read/write mode and from what I read writing to an NTFS partition requires a kernel upgrade and is still downright insane.

:: EDIT :: Didn't work. I'd rather solve the XP installer problem than rebuild (and possibly de-stabilize) my kernel and fuck up the rest of the partition at this point.

[sagit]

Originally posted by druid
I'll try the fsck but I doubt it'll work for NTFS. I can't even mount the partition in read/write mode and from what I read writing to an NTFS partition requires a kernel upgrade and is still downright insane.


indeed. maybe the latest kernel is okay now, but i've always understood that ntfs is RO on linux.

[chip256]

Try NTFSDOS (http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/ntfsdos.shtml). i've recovered my win2k server install a couple of times with it. it allows running of chkdsk to scan your NTFS partitions.

[druid]

OK the problem is half solved. I made 6 boot disks in Linux from the images Bishi kindly sent me. Those XP SP1 disks got me to the recovery console where the XP's CD should have taken me in the first place. From there I ran bootcfg to fix the corrupted boot.ini. Apparently it was the only damaged file, yet so important. Of course all this still took hours of diagnosis and experimenting.

As plext and Bishi found out, it's probably the Geforce4 that keeps jamming the Windows setup. When I get my hands on an older display card I'll try again. Meanwhile I'll wait for this old hdd to burn again and look at my new drive which I can't use. :spingo:

[sagit]

Originally posted by druid
...

As plext and Bishi found out, it's probably the Geforce4 that keeps jamming the Windows setup. When I get my hands on an older display card I'll try again....

can you boot into safe mode and uninstall the geforce4 drivers (nasically start again from vga then update to correct drivers)?

[Drakin]

Is it a generic gf4 card?

I've got a winfast A180 card and it shits itself with the drivers from nvida (even though they say you can use nvida drivers) but stick on the winfast drivers and it works heaps better..

[MisterBishi]

It's an Asus card, and it shits itself during the XP install, so there is no safe mode to boot to, and changing drivers isnt straight forward (although plext advises its possible to put the drivers into the i386 dir somewhere).

[wolfpac181]

If it's XP pro.... you can sfc /scannow.

You can also us a normal dos/linux bootdisk to access the cdrom, from the CD there's a dir that is for tools, I think in there you can make a set of xp/2000 boot disks run it and get 4 floppies.

[druid]

Originally posted by wolfpac181
You can also us a normal dos/linux bootdisk to access the cdrom, from the CD there's a dir that is for tools, I think in there you can make a set of xp/2000 boot disks run it and get 4 floppies.

Wouldn't those 4 disks contain the same installer that shits itself?

The six SP1 installation floppies don't have this problem but you can't install plain XP with them as they require the (XP+)SP1 CD.

[Spingo]

Originally posted by druid
Once I've booted from the XP CD and the blue loader has done it's magic (loads of device drivers loaded) it says more or less "Setup is starting Windows", then some cdrom access happens, my keyboard lights flash and go off, optical mouse led flashes....and then it dies.


Hrmm.. This sounds EXACTLY the same as what happens when I try to install Win2K/WinXP on my PII 266 system.

The problem that I have with that one comes down to ACPI settings in BIOS - more to the fact in my case, it's that the mobo I'm using doesn't strictly adhere to the ACPI standard. When I get to that part of the setup, the ACPI instructions are loaded to memory, and the system hangs.

To get around this is simple - At the screen where it says something like "Press F5 to install additional drive dontrller drivers", press F6. This will load a standard power interface driver instead of the advanced one, and comes up a-ok.

You might wanna give that one a go....

[druid]

Thanks Spingo! I don't think I've ever had probs with ACPI but I'll give it a go. Especially after seeing that some MSI's BIOS updates remedy ACPI Errors displayed in Event Viewer.

What puzzles me though is how I was able to install XP with this board in the first place. Furthermore it isn't encouraging that according to their site my BIOS version should already contain the fix for my problem...ah well I'll take an old gfx card with me just in case and try to get my hands on the XP with SP1 CD.