Repair Not recognizing win 2k

[gtjr92]

My laptop keeps giving me blue screen of death when it tries to boot into windows 2000. The windows 2000 start up screen comes up and the blue progress bar shows progress then it shows the BSOD and reboots. I see the BSOD, but it reboots so fast I have no idea what the error message is.

I tried to boot into safe mode and I get the same exact thing.

I get the same if I try Last known good as well.

So I tried booting to the Win 2k CD running repair and it tells me it cannot find a win 2000 install.

However if I choose to

1. Install Win 2k (I did this for kicks) this tells me that there is another operating system installed do I want to still install this. I chose no Clearly it sees something is installed.

Since only win 2k is installed here that must be what It is seeing.

2. If i go to the recovery console it also sees my win 2k install it comes up and asks which installation do I want to recover It list it and says 1 (WinNT)

I tried running chkdsk from recovery console It did not show any errors,

I also ran fixmbr and fix boot to no avail.

So why is the repair process not recognizing

my install so I can reinstall/repair the OS.

I have SP4 on this pc.

Thanks for the help!

[jaclaz]

From what you write it seems like you have a problem in a not-so-initial phase of booting.

It could be a corrupted driver and/or a corrupted entry in the Registry.

Is your boot drive FAT32 or NTFS?, if the latter the procedure is slighty more complex.

Basically you should get a DOS boot disk (either a "real" floppy or a floppy image to be burned to CD or USB stick if your machine has no floppy and you can't get your hands on a USB one) capable of accessing the filesystem on your disk, if NTFS you need to use NTFS4DOS:

http://www.free-av.com/antivirclassic/avira_ntfs4dos.html

or a PE based disk, like the UBCD4WIN.

Then you can backup all hives of your current Registry and replace them with the original ones.

The procedure is sketched here:

http://www.willingsoftware.com/service/registry.shtml

for just the SOFTWARE hive, repeat steps for ALL registry hives, this can be done in Recovery Console as well:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545/en-us

see also this for reference:

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=71807

If the PC does not start, you can edit boot.ini to add to your existing entry /BASEVIDEO /SOS /BOOTLOG parameter, reference here:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysintern...on/bootini.mspx

/BASEVIDEO

Causes Windows to use the standard VGA display driver for GUI-mode operations.

/BOOTLOG

Causes Windows to write a log of the boot to the file %SystemRoot%\Ntbtlog.txt.

/SOS

Causes Windows to list the device drivers marked to load at boot time and then to display the system version number (including the build number), amount of physical memory, and number of processors.

Boot.ini can be modified from DOS, even on NTFS, and without the NTFS4DOS driver, with this nifty utility:

EditBINI™

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/utilities.html

If you have a way to access the Registry of that machine, you should edit it to disable "Automatically restart", reference here for XP , but Win2k is just the same:

http://www.theeldergeek.com/auto_reboot_on_system_crash.htm

so that you can actually read the BSOD error.

It should be possible to do the above from recovery console, but a PE based boot Cd would be more convenient. (I haven't touched Recovery Console in years)

Three small lessons you and everyone reading this should learn from this experience are:

1) First thing ALWAYS disable "Automatically restart" option after install

2) ALWAYS use ERUNT:

http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/

3) Whenever it is possible (read ALWAYS ) install a second basic instance of win2k/XP on the machine, or make (if you have an XP or later license) a PE bootable CD it is VERY convenient

jaclaz

Edited May 2, 2007 by jaclaz

[gtjr92]

Thanks I will check them out!