PC refuses to boot

[Satch]

Argh! Just cycles and throws up:

Invalid boot .INI file
Booting from C:\windows\
NTDETECT failed

Ideas/solutions very welcome!

 

[grober]

Hard disc boot sector corrupted?? try booting from a floppy/cd-- if you can get into windows you may be able to access some diagnostics?? or repair windows from the recover utility on the cd??

 

[Rose Chap]

You could try a recovery from the Windows CD ROM as Grober rightly says. That usually does the trick.

 

[Chris_J]

Boot up off your XP CD and when the option is available, run the recovery console (R). When you're there and typed in the administrator password etc, type fixboot

C:\>fixboot

 

[WLeg]

You might want to consider replacing your disk drive....once it has failed you, can you fully trust it again.......

Once you have a new drive installed and XP/Vista/etc installed you can easily slave the old one and copy off the data......

 

[jpskiller]

You may want to check Hdd/Ram etc download hirens bootcd, has all hard drive manufacturers testing utils + many more tools for ram, cpu etc http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3615863/Hirens_Boot_Cd_8.8_

 

[Satch]

Thanks for all the suggestions. Booted up off the CD and did a CHKDSK, sure enough some problems that were claimed to be irrecoverable but a second go sorted them.

FIXBOOT did the trick but after a few minutes lost contact with the boot C: drive. Much cursing & swearing. Well after some tinkering found a broken connector on the power supply which must have been causing an intermittant power loss and may well have caused the drive to get in trouble.

Fixed that, did a full disc scan overnight and all seems well. Except that all my Outlook Express email files and all Explorer favourites have gone! Did a full disc search for .dbx files (including hidden folders & files) and the only ones I can find are those I pulled down this morning, sitting where they should be. All the rest have gone.

Address book etc all still there. Which was a puzzle and very annoying!

 

[grober]

Bummer! Can't suggest a fix I,m afraid. Still better than a new hard disc tho .

 

[recycled]

Please try to back up your entire hard drive on DVD .create 4 rescue disks and duplicate your .ntoskrnl files,ntdetect,boot.ini and system.ini files .Also contact your vendor for some product recovery discs.These would take your computer to the state it came out of the shop .

 

[Satch]

Please try to back up your entire hard drive on DVD .create 4 rescue disks and duplicate your .ntoskrnl files,ntdetect,boot.ini and system.ini files .Also contact your vendor for some product recovery discs.These would take your computer to the state it came out of the shop .

It is back to the state required in terms of operating system and software but has lost email files!

I have Acronis True Image and sort of back up each month or so by creating a compressed image onto the second hard drive but restoring from that purges everything since the backup date.

Anyway found out how to backup Outlook Express emails now and will be doing that more often!

From the Outlook Express menu select Tools | Options | Maintenance and click the StoreFolder button.

You see a dialog with the name of the directory that has your mail files. If you look in that directory you find files named after your mail folders and news groups.

They all have a .DBX suffix. Outlook Express keeps all messages in these database files. If you make copies of these files regularly, you'll have a safe backup of your OE mail.

To restore the backup data, copy it back to the directory.

You can selectively restore folders by just copying specific files back. Alternatively, you can use OE's File | Import | Messages feature to import one or more of the backup folders.

Email Account Settings

As far as we know, the procedure works for all kind of email: The regular SMTP / POP3 based email, MAPI, IMAP or even the free Hotmail Account, that is built into Outlook. For Hotmail, however, some messages and settings might be stored only at the Hotmail server ( = somewhere at Microsoft !) and not on your local PC.

 

[SEM]

My outlook stores all the emails in .pst files i've backed them up a couple of times and reinstalled after install on new pc
Does express store them differently?

try looking
C:\Documents and Settings\*your name*\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook

 

[WLeg]

Yes - different programs, but in either you can simply exit the program, find the relevance PST or DBX files and copy them to make a backup.

 

[lexie]

I have Acronis True Image and sort of back up each month or so by creating a compressed image onto the second hard drive but restoring from that purges everything since the backup date.

If you have a recent full image from before your crash, then use it. I don't know Acronis, but most imagers have a tool you can run from within windows, select the files you want to restore (dbx, pst, ...). select an alternative restore location, not the original location but for example c:\my_restored_emails\, so you don't override you new emails. then use the import feature of outlook to import the lost emails from the restored files into outook. delete the restored files (c:\my_restore_emails\) which are obsolete. and voila you're done.
you will ofcourse have lost emails since last backup, but new emails since your recovery will be kept.

ofcourse, before doing first make a backup