Can't boot or access files, help!

  • Thread starter Thread starter David Parker
  • Start date Start date
D

David Parker

Last night my PC was working fine, and I shut down the computer correctly,
without problems. Today I switch it on and Win2000 won't boot.

First, a bit about my system. I have a single hard disk with 2 partitions,
approx 20GB each. The first is a FAT32 partition on which I have Windows 98
installed. The second is an NTFS partition on which I have Windows 2000
installed. I have the boot menu that Windows 2000 stuck on, which gives me a
choice of which operating system to start when I switch on the PC. I have an
AMD Athlon XP 1700+ processor, ATI Radeon 8500 graphics card and 512 MB DDR
memory. The memory passes memory tests (I can't remember which test program
I used but it was an intensive one which took several hours to complete from
a floppy disk).

Windows 98 still works fine, and all data on the FAT32 partition is
accessible. When I try to start Windows 2000 though, I get the following
message....
Windows 2000 could not start because the following file is missing or
corrupt: <windows 2000 root>\system32\ntoskrnl.exe
Please re-install a copy of the above file.

When I boot from the CD and go into the recovery console, I can switch to
drive D: (my NTFS partition), but cannot do a "dir" command. The error
message was something like "unable to list directory".

When I select the emergency recover process and insert my emergency recover
disk, the progress bar slowly gets up to 100% with a "checking drive C:"
message in the status bar. Upon reaching 100% I get a blue screen with the
following text....
STOP: 0x00000050 (0xD001FFA0, 0x00000000, 0xBFFC41E5, 0x00000000)
PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA Address BFFC41E5 base at BFFA2000 DateStamp
38441c2a - setupdd.sys

There's quite a lot of important files on my NTFS partition that were not
included, or have changed a lot, since the last backup. I'd very much like
to recover it. Please reply to the newsgroup.

Thanks,
Dave
 
David Parker said:
Last night my PC was working fine, and I shut down the computer correctly,
without problems. Today I switch it on and Win2000 won't boot.

First, a bit about my system. I have a single hard disk with 2 partitions,
approx 20GB each. The first is a FAT32 partition on which I have Windows 98
installed. The second is an NTFS partition on which I have Windows 2000
installed. I have the boot menu that Windows 2000 stuck on, which gives me a
choice of which operating system to start when I switch on the PC. I have an
AMD Athlon XP 1700+ processor, ATI Radeon 8500 graphics card and 512 MB DDR
memory. The memory passes memory tests (I can't remember which test program
I used but it was an intensive one which took several hours to complete from
a floppy disk).

Windows 98 still works fine, and all data on the FAT32 partition is
accessible. When I try to start Windows 2000 though, I get the following
message....
Windows 2000 could not start because the following file is missing or
corrupt: <windows 2000 root>\system32\ntoskrnl.exe
Please re-install a copy of the above file.

When I boot from the CD and go into the recovery console, I can switch to
drive D: (my NTFS partition), but cannot do a "dir" command. The error
message was something like "unable to list directory".

When I select the emergency recover process and insert my emergency recover
disk, the progress bar slowly gets up to 100% with a "checking drive C:"
message in the status bar. Upon reaching 100% I get a blue screen with the
following text....
STOP: 0x00000050 (0xD001FFA0, 0x00000000, 0xBFFC41E5, 0x00000000)
PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA Address BFFC41E5 base at BFFA2000 DateStamp
38441c2a - setupdd.sys

There's quite a lot of important files on my NTFS partition that were not
included, or have changed a lot, since the last backup. I'd very much like
to recover it. Please reply to the newsgroup.

Thanks,
Dave
Click to expand...

Get a free copy of ntfsdos.exe from www.sysinternals.com, then
run it under Win98. It will make your NTFS files visible unless the
partition is damaged beyond repair.

This might be an opportunity to review your backup strategy.
Files must be backed up daily or weekly, depending on their
importance. I have seen lots of failed disks, and many failed
without warning.
 
Thanks. I was able to access the drive via ntfsdos. Most of the files have
been recovered, though some have been reduced to zero length, including my
Outlook PST file and the backup of my PST file. I had another backup on a
CD, but the CD seems unreadable.

I've recovered most things fortunately. Since reinstalling Windows 2000 I
have a new problem - my computer is no longer shutting down or restarting
correctly. When I go to Start/Shutdown, and select either the shutdown or
restart options (I haven't tried the others), the whole screen goes black,
and the computer doesn't restart or shutdown. I have to do it manually my
pressing the button on the actual computer. All I have installed is: all the
Windows updates (including WMP9), DirectX 9, latest ATI Radeon driver,
printer driver, Visual Studio 6.0 and Office 2000. Not sure at which point
the problem appeared.

Dave
 
Nah, can't read them on either. But I know what you mean - I had a CD that
was readable on 98 and 2000, but not on XP.
I've worked out the restart / shutdown problem. It was fixed by removing
DirectCD. It's the same version of DirectCD I was using before I reinstalled
everything, so I'm guessing WMP 9 messed it up somehow (uninstalling WMP 9
and reinstalling DirectCD doesn't fix the problem though).
 
Get on a machine that will read them, c&p them to the hdd, and burn another
CD afterward. Your extra jibberish should be clean.
Worth a try on a limited basis first.

don
----------

Nah, can't read them on either. But I know what you mean - I had a CD that
was readable on 98 and 2000, but not on XP.
I've worked out the restart / shutdown problem. It was fixed by removing
DirectCD. It's the same version of DirectCD I was using before I reinstalled
everything, so I'm guessing WMP 9 messed it up somehow (uninstalling WMP 9
and reinstalling DirectCD doesn't fix the problem though).
 
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