Installation reboots... and my PC is "dead".

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G

Guest

Brand new Philips X51 Notebook.

Partition C is XP Home
Partition D is XP Pro
and Partition E is a new one for Vista.

Installation goes OK until it says it needs to restart... all i get is a
flashing cursor and a completely dead PC - can't boot into either XPs.

I tried using XP recovery console to rebuild the bootcfg but to no avail.

Help!
 
The correct command is "fixmbr".

Since he already stated that he's tried using the recovery console to
"rebuild the bootcfg" I'm guessing he's already tried that.

fdisk /mbr is for fat16/32 drives and most people that are running XP don't
typically use the fat file system(s) for thier fixed disks.

Robert, do you have a WinPE or BartPE disk? Can you access your disks from
there if you do have one? If not, the partitions may be un-recoverable.

Mic
 
Kip said:
fdisk /mbr works for ntfs drives, too. I've used it.
Click to expand...

Neat trick, all I get when I type "fdisk" or "fdisk /mbr" at a recovery
console is, "The command is not recognized Type HELP for a list of supported
commands."

I have several DOS and Win 9x floppy disks, but no floppy drive installed.
So I'm not going to try one of those on an NTFS formatted drive.

Not that I think it would work anyway, since fdisk (or DOS, for that matter)
doesn't recognize NTFS partitions.

I've never worked on a Windows XP that was formatted with FAT 32, so I can't
even say if fdisk is available when the drive is FAT32, but I know for sure
it's not available for NTFS.
 
Hello again.

Thanks for your replies guys, very helpful.

I think if I'd done fixmbr it would have fixed it, i'll know that for next
time - thanks.

In a mild panic at 3am I fixed it by reinstalling XP Pro which sorted out
the MBRs for me.

I've since installed Vista on my elderly desktop (XP1800+) with no problems
at all...

Cheers,

- Rob
 
Hello again.

Thanks for your replies guys, very helpful.

I think if I'd done fixmbr it would have fixed it, i'll know that for next
time - thanks.

In a mild panic at 3am I fixed it by reinstalling XP Pro which sorted out
the MBRs for me.

I've since installed Vista on my elderly desktop (XP1800+) with no problems
at all...

Cheers,

- Rob
 
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