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got a customer with a winxp pro pc that all of a sudden won't boot up. It just hangs after "verifying dmi pool" message on screen. It is formatted in fat32, I tried a win98 startup disk in it; it gives me an error message "file allocation table bad, drive c". is there a way in xp to fix the master boot record, or am I barking up the wrong tree?
his system:
athlon 2200 xp
1 gig sdram
western digital 40 gig
Is it fat32 or ntfs?
Either way - boot from the xp setup - go to recovery console and type in fixmbr then when thats done fixboot
or simply run chkdsk from the recovery console to see what the problem is
it is fat32. a year ago it was upgraded from win98 and has been fine till now. I recently upgraded memory from 512 to 1 gig a couple of weeks ago, but I tried the old memory and it wasn't it.
Seen this on several systems, go into the BIOS and set "System Defaults" and reboot.
Worth a try, I've seen it quite a bit, then tell them not to mess in there no more.
I had this too, but I just turned ACPI back on...and I wanted that IRQ too...
I put another hard drive in this system and it is working fine. customer had 6 month old ghost image backed up on another pc, so he is up and least running till I can get his recent data back. I hooked this drive up as a slave to another pc running xp, it tried to run scandisk on this drive at startup then said it was not formatted properly and was unusable. I ran easyrecover software on it and it finds a lot of the files on the drive. I am getting another drive today so I will try to recover files to it. I would like to try running windows setup and try the repair option or using recovery console on it. Do you think this is a good idea? or do I risk losing the data all together?:confused:
If scandisk didn't like the format, setup won't run. Even if you run the setup without scandisk yes I believe you will lose the lot.
Easyrecover was able to get most the files back, I think he had a good old fashioned crash. I reformatted the drive and it has been working fine in a different pc. I think he will back up more often now :D