XP repair 'mare

[fool]

I’m trying to fix my dads xp home installation.

When the computer boots up it gets to the logon screen, lets you type in the password, and then hangs.

Dad called MESH (the box maker) and was told to run the XP recovery cd, choose the option to setup windows followed by the “repair selected win XP installation “. He was specifically told not to run the “repair XP using recovery console”.
Trouble is that no such option is presented.

At which point I arrived and after a bit of googling found this.

So I tried that only to be told that the files C:\windows\repair\system and C:\windows\repair\default could not be found.

So, is there anything I can do that will avoid loosing all user settings and non-backuped data?

 

[blakerwry]

what it sounds like they wanted him to do was install WinXP ontop of itself... not use the Automated system repair or recovery console.

He shouldnt lose any documents or any of his own files.. he might have to reinstall drivers/applications.

 

[Mercutio]

You need to play along with the installation a bit more. IIRC, you choose to install Windows on the hard disk, select the drive, get "Please Wait While the installer Scans your disk for other Windows installations..."

It finds your install and says "Do you want to overwrite or repair?" Maybe 25% of the time, repair works.

Can you start in safe mode? If Windows is working well enough to bring up a login prompt, probably the best thing to do is run something like SFC.exe, if possible.

There's nothing that can help you in the recovery console.

 

[sechs]

Sounds like a profile failure.

Anyway, try the repair as Merc has pointed out. It sometimes works.

If all else fails, you can upgrade Windows over itself.

 

[Mercutio]

Naw, a bad profile will just give "Your profile will not be loaded. Using default." or somesuch. I've seen Windows handle that one dozens of times.

 

[timwhit]

Could be a problem with the pagefile getting misplaced, corrupted, etc. Windows does not handle this very well, I've seen countless 2K installations blitzed because Windows couldn't find the pagefile.

 

[blakerwry]

hmm.. never ran into that myself... and I've done all kinds of page file misplacing

 

[sechs]

Naw, a bad profile will just give "Your profile will not be loaded. Using default." or somesuch. I've seen Windows handle that one dozens of times.

I've had Windows hang at login on a profile error. I've also had looping login and login -- nothing there.