Ah, that makes things much clearer. I still can't help much but at
If I was able to boot in any way at all I'd probably find a way
through inhibiting drivers & processes. But I can't get past the
briefest glimpse of the splash screen
(
Got any other drives laying around, friends with spare drives, or a
friend that'd let you put your hard drive into their machine?
If you could ge ANY drive, even a tiny one of only a few Gigs,
installed as a boot drive it's prety likely you would be able to do some
recovery work.
For the near future: I'm not blaming this on SP3, but ... I am
starting to see some commonalities in the complaints about it,
which -might- indicate it has a problem or two.
Losing Update capabilities is one I've noticed with SP3 that shows
up more than others, and some of the more complex programs are seemingly
starting to have problems. But who knows, there are so many other
possibilities; just thought I'd mention it.
Are you certain the recovery disk doesn't have a "repair"
100% certain
Ouch. Did any bootable CDs at all come with the machine? Or do you
have any other bootable CDs period? That would be one way to possibly
get at the Repair Console, if you're versed enough to use it. Minimum,
you might be able to run TI's recovery by booting from a different
drive, and just viewing/copying from the borked one. Or as a last
resort, chkdsk might be able to be run against the borked drive that way
too. It all dpends on having another drive to boot from.
Bootdisk.com has files to make bootable startup CDs for XP and fairly
good instructions to go with them. FWIW anyway.
Did have a backup but the USB HDD has been dropped. Never got round to
checking it till I needed it
(
Tsk, tsk, shame on you! :^}
SP3 was already installed. Presumably if I try an upgrade from Home
to Pro it should retain the settings?
Theoretically, maybe, some at least, IFF you do the correct upgrade
process. It's all a crapshoot, but an upgrade from Home to Pro wouldn't
be a bad thing IMO.
If money is an issue, you might achieve the same thing with Home if
you don't want the upgrade, but if you have the opportunity I'd go for
Pro simply because it's better for this kind of work and if you ever
wished you could use some of its networking features.
If money is not an issue, I'd recommend going for a full Retail
version of the software. Then you could easily and legally move it to a
different machine in the future should that opportunity present itself.
Depends on what you think of Vista, I guess. Personally I'm skipping
Vista and waiting to see what Windows Version 7 is all about.
I've now cloned the drive using Acronis True Copy recovery disk, so I
have a spare non-booting disk to experiment on
)
Great: All you need now is to beg, borrow or (??) a drive and make it
bootable.
Hmm, even a friend's XP disk would make a temporary OS for the boot
disk. You won't be able to activate it, there might be some error
messages depending on how glued it is to the machine it came from, but
it would let you get at a lot of things until the timer expired for
activation.
No error message - it just keeps crashing as soon as it starts to
load XP
I back up all my data files, music, photos etc automatically using NT
shadow, so none of these are lost.
The real hassle is all my Adobe CS3 progs and the numerous add-ons
I've accumulated.
It's a massive collection. Re-installing that lot will take ages.
And Adobe can be very sniffy about reactivating if you haven't
de-activated existing copies.
Much better if I can find out what the Netgear uninstall has
corrupted.
I know this is unsolicited advice again, but the first thing I have
people do when they have to do clean installs is immediately, before
they even connect to the 'net, make a backup of the bootable drive using
ntbackup.exe that comes with both Home and Pro but isn't installed by
default on Home. Oops; forgot, you have TI; even better as long as
Shadow Copy is working.
If there are hidden partitions (for recovery) I have them make sure
they get those backed up, too. I have them burn those to a CD or DVD.
Then it's at least easy to get to "step 1" in reconstructing a boot
drive for the machine if it's ever needed.
Might be useful advice here: The second it starts to breathe, back
it up. Then you'll always at least be able to get back to that point if
your troubleshooting borks the system again. Can't tell you how many
times that's saved my own butt<g>.
FWIW, it actually sounds like buying a copy of XP and starting from
scratch is actually the fastest route for you. Troubleshooting things
like this can take months if you're not careful or get obsessed with
something.
N O T E
A word about chkdsk: Make running chkdsk with the /f or /r flags set a
last resort. It's not unusual for chkdsk, depending on the magnitude
and complexity of corruption, to make a disk totally unreadable. A lot
of people don't realize that and haven't come across it yet.
Regards, & good luck!
Twayne
