WIN XP Tips

© Brooke Clarke 2005

23 Sep 2005 - using the methods below the 160 GB C: drive appeared to be working, but the next day it was not.
24 - 25 Sep 2005 trying to recover the 160 GB drive. 
            
26 Sep 2005 Using 80 GB drive for this update.   A few days ago my thinking was that the 160 GB drive had been damaged some months ago and once repaired would be OK.  Now it looks like the damage has caused an application to be corrupted and that application is doing more damage to the NTFS when it runs.  The two most likely applications are Norton System Works and/or Starbnad, since these are running all the time.
Plan is to boot into Safe Mode and remove Starband and Norton System Works and set msconfig for a clean boot.  Then in normal mode boot and reinstall NSW and Starband.

After 3 passes through Recovery Console CHKDSK /R the 160 GB drive passes, but locks up during Windows repair at "saving settings".
Will try the repair again.

26 Sep 2005 5:09 pm - After a number of passes with WinXp Recovery Console CHKDSK and a WinXP Repair install from the CD I'm now up and running in SP1a (the CD-ROM version).  To get here I have used Add/Remove programs to remove Norton System Works and Starband (plus a number of other programs).  This does not mean the boot freeze problem is fixed.  To find out the computer needs to be run for a number of days and CHKDSK used to see if errors come back.

27 Sep 2005 - Problem Solved.  After buying a new 200 GB hard drive the install frooze at about 80% of the file coyping.  My computer dealer had the same result, but by connecting the drive directly to the cable (i.e. not using the drawer) it worked OK.  When I got the computer home it locked up.  After trying a number of combinations I changed the hard drive cabling to be:
Primary -----[no connection]--------C: drawer (and installed a new drawer)
Secondary ----[CD-DVD]---------E: drawer
After this change the 160 MB drive started working.
So all these problems were probably caused by a bad electrical connection between the drive cable and the drawer.  For more on what goes wrong see Hints and Tips.

28 Sep 2005 - still working.

Computer freezes during normal operation or freezes during boot.

In msconfig if you do a clean boot and can boot into the disktop but without the Clean Boot you can not get to the disktop, then there's a problem in one of the msconfig files.  To work with msconfig when you can not get to the desktop, use "F8" during startup to get into Safe Mode (administrator).  Do a Clean Boot in msconfig by turning off , SYSTEM.INI, WIN.INI and Load Startup Items, and in the Services tab click "Hide all Microsoft Services" then click on "Disable All".  This leaves only the microsoft services.  Then Apply, Close, Restart.  See:
Microsoft - How to perform a clean boot in Windows XP -

If you can boot in "Clean Boot" mode and can not boot otherwise, then one of the items that was turned off is causing the problem.  Try turing on SYSTEM.INI and try again, if you can boot then try turning on WIN.INI, if you can boot then try turning on all services by clicking on the grayed out check box to clear it and again to place a check mark there.  If you can still boot try turning on startup services (since this is the last one, doing this will put you back to normal startup).  Once you know which file is causing problems you can edit that file (click on the tab with the same name) and only turn on half the items and try again, then half of those, etc. until you find the one causing the problem.  In my case it was a file associated with Acrobat in the startup items list that was the problem. 

The fix for me was to upgrade to Acrobat 7 (full version).

Boot.Ini Log File

The problem with running chkdsk (or Norton Disk Doctor) from Win XP is that it will not check files that are being used by Windows.  You can get around this problem by using the chkdsk that's part of the Recovery Console on the WIN XP install CD-ROM.

Prior to running Recovery Console or Win XP Repair disconnect the printer, LAN and any other digital I/O device.  You can leave the mouse, keyboard, monitor, speaker and audio/telephone cables connected.

You should run chkdsk from the Recovery Console prior to running this repair.

When you boot with the Win XP install CD-ROM, it loads a minimal operating system, similar to DOS, but compatible with Win XP.  At the first screen you select install Win XT (not Recovery Console) and at the next screen it will find  that you already have Win XP and offer to attempt a repair.  This repair should not touch your applications, it just reinstalls the Windows files.  This is great because when it works you don't need to reinstall all your software. 

If you have problems with the repair you can run it again and again.  If it appears too have a problem you might be able to fix it by starting over and entering the Recovery Console (select R on the first page), on my system there was only one system entry like:
1. Windows XP
for my case the administrator password is not defined, so just press enter works.
so I entered 1 <return> and then
exit
to restart.  After the restart try the repair install again.

During the installation of devices you may be asked for some file.  The dialog box has a drop down menu with a number of possible paths to the desired file.  Also note that the file name is predefined so that when you open a folder instead of seeing a bunch of files, you will only see the desired file if it's there.  A simple thing to try is to select each of the already existing paths that start with C: and most of the time you will find the file.  Otherwise you will need to use the installation disks that go with your hardware.

You will need your Win XP product key as part of this process.  In my case it was on a sticker on the computer.  I copied it to the envelope holding the CD making it much easier to read then crawling under the table an using a flashlight to read the sticker.

You also may need to "activate Windows" and this can be done over the phone by speaking the required numbers.

My Win XP install disk was done for SP1a but I'm running SP2.  After the Win XP Repair a convenient way to update to SP2 is to have a great majority of the SP2 files on your hard disk.  This can be done by downloading the SP2 file from:
Microsoft - Windows XP Service Pack 2 Network Installation Package for IT Professionals and Developers
file name: WindowsXP-KB835935-SP2-ENU.exe
Then just execute the file.  Since I did the repair a number of times this came in very handy.

After installing SP2 and rebooting, then go to START \ Windows Update and get the automatic update notification software, install it, and restart.  Then the update icon will come on and you can get the updates that are not in the large file above.

Win XP is not based on DOS like WIN98.  So when the BIOS finishes, it checks for floppy and/or CD/DVD disks and if there are none it starts Win XP.  I think in the first few milli seconds it looks at all the drives and if it sees two drives with Primary Active partitions the drive that is not the one that was used for the current boot has it's ID changed in such a way to make it non bootable.  This messes up other things.  I think that this is one of the problems I was having.

Star Band (2-way satellite internet connection) is constantly writing to the hard drive and if Ghost 9 is used from inside windows the results are unstable. Symantec recommends that if any application has disk write capability and it is in use that you use Ghost 2003 from DOS.  But there's a problem with Ghost 2003 and Win XP.  See the above paragraph. 

The solution is to use a floppy disk to boot into Ghost 2003.  It may be a good idea to not press "exit" but rather power down the computer to prevent Win XP from running.  The following web page suggests that after Ghost 2003 runs it will return to PC-DOS, which would be safe.  I'll know shortly.

Symantec  - How to perform a disk-to-disk clone - "WARNING: Do not start the computer after cloning until the instructions say to do so. Booting a computer from the hard drive when the computer has two hard drives with Primary Active partitions can damage program installations and trigger configuration changes on both source and destination that you might not be able to reverse without restoring from backups."

WIN 98 and earlier versions of home op systems were built on top of DOS.  WIN XP is it's own system and there's no underlying DOS.
This has all kinds of implications in that you can no longer run any DOS utilities.  The only thing that comes close is the "Recovery Console".
Maybe someone will make some utility programs that can be use with a WIN XP disk drive?

Over the years I have used a number of different methods for backing up computer data.  I looked into RAID and it's a transparent (read easy) way to protect against hard drive failures.  RAID also can double the bandwidth between the CPU and the disk drives.  BUT, it provides no protection from a virus erasing the C: drive.

112 July 2006 - A good friend has been running a RAID system for a number of years, but a few months ago had a problem and it turns out that he had a bad drive and a corrupt drive so really did not have a backup at all. 

The only way you know you have a backup is to actually use the backup.

On my WIN98 computer I had the C: drive installed in the desktop case and had a removable drawer for the back up drive.  The drawer has a key that's both a mechanical lock and an electrical switch.  When the key is "off" you can remove the drive and also the drive is electrically disconnected from the computer so no virus can get to it.  Every now and then I would use Norton Ghost by booting into DOS and then doing a Disk to Disk copy.  If all is well the backup drive can be installed into the computer if it's needed.  The problem is a hardware failure may cause the back up disk to be bad, but you only find out when you really need it.

So, in my XP computer I have two drawers, let's call the empty slots C: and E:.  In these are drives D1 and D2.  After backing up D1 to D2, D1 is put in a safe location removed from the computer and the building the computer is in.  D2 is put into the C: slot and D3 is put into the E: slot, BUT the key is turned off on E:D3.  You don't want a big hole in the computer case messing up the air flow and you don't want two active hard drives.

The great things about this backup system are:

• It's fairly quick to back up a large amount of data (maybe faster if the C: and E: slots are connected to different busses?),
• That you start using the back up right away, so if there's some problem with it you will know.  Other backup systems that send the data to some storage location may or may not work when you need to get the data.
• Ghost does not require that the target drive have more capacity than the source drive, only that the target drive has enough capacity to hold the source data.  For example you can back up a 160 GB capacity C: drive that has 60 GB of data to an 80 GB target drive.
•  Ghost does NOT copy empty sectors so the time depends on the data size NOT the drive size.

WARNING You can not have two hard drives both of which have a image of the WIN XP operating system connected at the same time and be running WIN XP! If you do the op system will think you are trying to make an illegal copy and trash one or both drives.

So to do the backup you need to power up the computer with both the primary and backup drive connected to the computer but with a floppy disk that boots you into some flavor of DOS and then runs Ghost 2003.  It may be that Ghost 2006 will work directly from WIN XP if you use the "image" type backup, but then you can not swap drives to "proof" the backup.

It seems strange to me that the hard drive makers, Symantec (Ghost) and/or Microsoft are not supporting this backup method with a bullet proof software to do it.  The hard drive companies would sell 2 or 3 times (or more) the number of drives and many other vendors would have less install support to do after either hardware or software caused disk crashes.