Unmountable Boot Sector
Drez
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So my coworker has a laptop. Doesn't boot. Blue Screen of Death. Unmountable Boot Sector. WinXP. Like I said, laptop. I can get into "DOS" using this freeware boot disc I downloaded a long time ago called NTFS4DOS. It lets me run this customized CHKDISK-type program which found some errors and resolved them, but the computer still won't boot into WinXP. This boot disk has no facility for booting into Windows itself...it just provides a DOS command shell for reading NTFS drives.
Anyway, I can read the drive. Sort of. When I try to do a directory listing on
(where WinXP and most of her data is stored), it freezes when it is nearly done with the listing. It starts to list the number of directories (after listing all the files and directories), and freezes.
Is there some kind of magic trick or magic fix-it or something I can download to fix this? I really just need to get her pictures/videos transferred off, but I don't know how to do that via DOS.
Anyway, I can read the drive. Sort of. When I try to do a directory listing on
(where WinXP and most of her data is stored), it freezes when it is nearly done with the listing. It starts to list the number of directories (after listing all the files and directories), and freezes.Is there some kind of magic trick or magic fix-it or something I can download to fix this? I really just need to get her pictures/videos transferred off, but I don't know how to do that via DOS.
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1) I can't get to the Recovery Console in WinXP. I have a WinXP disc and simply don't get that option. When WinXP setup gets to the "Install WinXP" part, it sees that partition as having almost fully free space with an "UNKNOWN" file system.
2) I can get to the directory structure on this partition using some boot disc I downloaded years ago called NTFSBOOT, however I can't do anything while here. I have an external HDD but using "COPY" just makes the PC hang while "XCOPY" and "XCOPY32" yield the following, even if I'm STARING at the filename: "File not found - ????????.???"
I should note that this is a laptop.
Anyone have any ideas? I need to give it back to her tomorrow regardless of if I fix it or not, but it would be good to have it fixed for her, or at least to get the files off. The latter is actually far more important than the former. Is there some kind of pre-installed bootable OS I can boot off of DVD or something? I really just need to get these files off the laptop.
If the filesystem is being flagged "Unknown" then the table is probably corrupted and/or gone. The file not found - ?????.???? error isn't regarding the file you're trying to copy, it's telling you it can't find xcopy/xcopy32.
go to c:\windows\command\
fdisk
view partition table
is it still unknown?
exit fdisk and don't write anything
fdisk /mbr
I think xp had a fixmbr utility, I don't recall.
If you just want the files, without fixing the boot record you just need to copy.exe to be somewhere you can find it. Alternatively, change your path variable with the set command.
set path=c:\windows\command;c:\windows\system32;c:\windows\system
Now when you type copy, it will look in those places to see if such a thing exists.
edit: If COPY is locking it up, then it may be having trouble reading the drive entirely and you'll want an external copy.exe on whatever bootdisk you're using.
edit2: There are a half dozen flavors of linux that will run off a disk, but that may be more work than you're looking for.
It's been a while, but there's no "boot to command console" option in the windows XP setup. You have to go to the REPAIR option to get to a recovery console and poke around.
Thanks for all this. I'll look into it. And yeah regarding the recovery console - the REPAIR option isn't available for me when I boot into the WinXP disc.