Repairing XP?

[jrfuda]

Has anyone ever used the repair option on a winXP CD - when booting from the CD? If so, how did it go? I have a 2-week old install of XP Pro that became corrupted after a hiccup during my Zwave driver install (ran great for 2 weeks, but now it locks-up after only a few minutes.. the whole machine locks up, not just HS).

I'm not blaming the Zwave drivers, but the machine locked-up after the install (could be a coincidence) and when I had to reboot it, it gave me all sorts of problems (told me I had invalid dlls, one time told me it couldn't access my activation info, and a few other problems) I finally got it to run for a few minutes after going into safe mode and copying over the invalid dlls with known good copies, but now it locks-up after a few minutes.
The machine was scanned with both spybot and Norton AV 2004 w/latest definitions, and they found no nasties causing the problems (I was surprised the machine stayed up long enough for thes programs to do their scans). Also, the lockups occur even if HS, HSP, MLServer and JRMedia Center or closed or bypassed at startup.

Also, I've already read on several sites to NOT use the repair console on the boot CD, but rather to do the repair from within the install option, after the CD identifies your current installation (apparantly the repair console does bad things).

Anyway, what are folks experience with repairs? I figure it's worth a try, and if it doesn't work, I'll just start all ovcer again.

[TrOjAn]

Can you boot XP at all???

1 Tip I ALWAYS USE, i copy over the I386 folder from the windows xp CD to my hard drive, that way you can install XP over itself without having the cd drive working. Plus it installs a lot faster from the hard drive, of course dont put the i386 folder on your C: drive.

If so try booting to safemode, open dos prompt and type sfc /scannow it may help repair your system... if tha fails, boot to safe mode and reinstall XP over the top again, this sometimes repairs faults, you will need to install SP1 again after or if your brave like me install SP2

[jrfuda]

TrOjan, thanks for the tips. I can boot into XP fine, but it usually locks-up anywhere from 30 seconds to 20 minutes after it starts.

I used to not be able to boot into XP when it first happened, kept getting "hung" on checkdisk/scandisk (whatever it's called these days) at around 50%... It finally made it through after about the 20th reboot, but then I got the "invalid image, invalid dll, can't find activation info, etc. messages until I replaced a couple of dlls. Now it doesn't gripe about dlls anymore, it just locks-up!

I'll try your suggestions and see what happens.

[electron]

I agree with only using the repair during installation option, not the recovery console. I have recovered a non bootable XP system before that way (due to a SP upgrade gone bad), and the system was in perfect working order after this, with nothing missing and no software was crippled.

[Czechmarty]

I tried a few times to use the repair option, but never succesfuly. I found out that to do Format and clean install is sometimes the fastest and cleanest way. The re-install sometimes work and sometimes not, so you have to decide based on how much software you have on your computer.

[Rupp]

Why not use the "roll back" function. Find a date prior to the install and roll back. I have used this several times with perfect success.

[Czechmarty]

That really never worked for me, but it's worth a shot.
If something (dll's) got corrupted, the roll back will not be able to fix it.

[jrfuda]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><font size="-1">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Rupp:
Why not use the "roll back" function. Find a date prior to the install and roll back. I have used this several times with perfect success. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

In the 2-3 years I've been using XP, system restore has never worked for me well enough for me to want to use it again (it always creates at least as many problems as it fixes) so I have it turned-off on all my machines.

I have my my key folders (HS, MLS, JRMC) backed-up, so worse-case scenerio, I can do a clean install and start over.

[electron]

Actually, the roll back works great, I have recovered my MCE box this way many times, especially after the wrong codecs got installed and other DLL files were screwed up. I am so happy with it I schedule a nightly system restore backup now, and make a backup before I install a new driver or package.

If you don't have a lot of software installed, I also recommend just rebuilding the entire box, but as I have been able to recover screwed up systems before this way (a service pack upgrade going wrong isn't exactly a small error), it might be worth a shot if that is too much work.

[Stevech]

rollback (go to restore point) saved my touche one time - I got a bad infestation of spyware. Three nights of using Ad-aware and Norton Anti-virus didn't fix it. Doing a go-back did. I'm now a convert, since I would have had to reinstall XP or reformat the disk. I've used it also to undo a hosed up I/O driver.

[jrfuda]

Well, the repair worked well enough to get me booted back into XP normally, and the system seemed OK for about 30 minutes. Then it locked-up and upon reboot wouldn't even boot into safe mode, so I've done a clean reinstall of XP Pro this morning. My HS folders were backed-up so I can restore my HS install.

[jrfuda]

I reinstalled XP Pro and it's still flaky. It ran fine at first, and I even used true image to image the clean install in case I screwed it up later. After getting HS in, the lock-ups started again (My guess - not due to HS, just enough time passed that it was bound to happen again).

I then restored my clean image (Acronis true image worked pretty fast doing this, took about 6 minutes). About 10 minutes into running the new image, it crashed again.

I then tried one more time to install windows from scratch the old fashioned way, I even chose the regular NTFS format (vice the "quick") to ensure any possible bad sectors on the HDD would be found. The install made it through the formating, but then got hung about at 5% into the install, this has me convinced that I have some failing hardware somewhere.

The CPU and mobo are 5+ years old (P3 800 on HP-branded ASUS mobo). The HDDs (2) are about 18 months old each (one was a replacement from maxtor after the first died, and the other one that I bought while waiting for the RMA to complete). The Case and Power-supply are only a couple of weeks old (Antec Overture with Antec True Power 380Watt PS) so my guess is the problem is somewhere in the CPU and/or mobo.

I went to one of my favorite online stores, Directron.com and order a New Abit NF7-S mobo, an AMD XP 2600+ and 512MB RAM for less than $300 (figured I didn't need blow more $$$ on a new PC since the rest of my hardware is in pretty good shape -I HOPE-).

Anyway, Directron being only a few hours from here, I'll probably have my stuff tomorrow or Tuesday (Last order I placed with them arrived the next day, but today's Sunday, so I don't expect it until Tuesday.)

Hopefully this will solve this MAJOR problem and all the other little problems I've been having (slow TTS and other reaction-time issues resulting from running way too much stuff on a slow machine).

Wish me luck!