I did some more tinkering with my blinking dash issue and I found out the following things:
- FIXMBR + FIXBOOT did nothing. Fortunately it didn’t seem to hose my partition table so that’s good
- Booting from the WinXP SP2 CD and choosing to repair the installation did nothing
- Running the Windows Repair from the WinXP CD did nothing
- Parallel install of windows on the same partition (without formating) did nothing
- My backups seem to be ok – Captive NTFS actually works in Knoppix these days (yay)
I will try few other tips I got in the last thread but I guess I will need to format and reinstall Windows in the end. But will this work? The repair option should have theoretically fixed any corrupted files on windows side. FIXMBR and FIXBOOT should have fixed the boot entries. WTF else is there? What the hell is preventing windows from booting? Chances are that I might still have this issue after I reinstall. :(
In the meantime I wanted to share something very special that I have found while googling for potential solutions to my problem:
Best advice evar: “SHUT DOWN YOUR HOLE COMPUTER”. LOL! This, ladies and gentlemen is the collective wisdom of Yahoo Answers. I swear, I haven’t read a Yahoo answer thread that didn’t make me chuckle and weep for the downfall of humanity at the same time. And I’m not even talking about technology advice – any thread on that site is LULZ-worthy to some degree. :P
I found a solution to this. Well, sort off. Read the linked post.
[tags]blinking dash, windows, windows xp, winxp, fixboot, fixmbr, windows repair[/tags]
Well I assume you tried this but . . . pop in a dos boot disk and run fdisk and set the drive bootable. Sometimes this gets “unset” when problems occur. Even if you wiped the MBR using /mbr this step may need to be redone.
I did not see that mentioned yet but beyond that I also found that the ICEPACK boot manager tends to save my ass every time no matter how f’d a drive is and no matter what OS were on there. It tends to work some voodoo and always gets me booting into every OS on any given drive.
If you still need to get data off the drive I recommend doing that first and via a USB/IEEE1394 to IDE/SATA adapter. That way you can just make the drive a secondary external USB device and take whatever data you need off of there.
Good luck dude.
//Dan
I was actually able to copy my whole user profile to my external USB drive under Knoppix. I also scooped up random save game files from Program Files and etc. So all my configuration settings (including Firefox profile) and the shit I had in My Documents (bunch of pictures, some movies and torrents) got saved.
My Floppy haven’t worked for like 3 years now. :P I booted the Ultimate Boot CD but FDISK version that shipped with FreeDos said that C: is the active partition.
Sigh… I’m sick of this. I’m going to reformat, and see if that helps.
Hey! I got the Sidewinder mouse for Xmas too. Still playing with it a bit, but I’m happy so far. Hope you get to try it soon.
I once had a crazy hard drive like that. It turned out that the boot sectors were bad, but the rest of the drive was OK. Nothing to do but junk the drive.
Good luck.
-Ben
I actually tried it – the drive died the day after Christmas so I pretty much got a full day out of that mouse. It’s a good mouse, but bit on the bulky side. I will probably write a full review in a few days. :)
I like the windows debug mode very much. it displays each filename that it tries to load and execute, at least as long as text mode is active. when it switches to graphics nothing more is shown. when the boot process hangs usually the last filename shown is the one with problems.
this is the same nice thing as was alt-f2 in OS/2 boot process (sigh).