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Failure to reboot after OS Selector install

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I really hope someone can help me here...

I bought Disk Director 10 yesterday, partly to use as a boot manager. After installing it and rebooting (successfully) and without using any facility of Disk Director I ran the OS Selector install. This seemed to succeed as well and I was prompted to reboot.

Before reaching the windows loading screen my computer crashed with a blue screen (not BSOD) saying there was a problem, that windows had shut down to prevent damage, that I should run a chkdsk, and with an error code. I have attached a photo of that screen.

After retrying to boot a number of times and consistently getting the same problem I then tried booting from an XP-Install bootable cd - and got the same error. I tried with a different XP-Install bootable cd - same error. So now I am unable to boot my machine at all, and XP-install CD's don't work either. For the life of me I can't see any reason why any hard-disk issue should impact a cd-boot but that's what seems to be happening (does a CD-boot try to check anything on the hard-disk?).

Can anyone suggest what I can do next?

My machine is Windows XP SP3.

Regards

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Kim:

Two thoughts come to mind after searching on the error code from your BSOD.

1. One post described the exact same error code and it turned out to be overly-aggressive RAM timing. I suppose that defective RAM could cause the same symptom.
http://www.csd.dficlub.org/forum/showthread.php?t=1297

2. By chance does your BIOS have a setting to block boot sector viruses? OS Selector would have modified the MBR, and if the BIOS blocked the modification, who knows what would have happened.

Can you boot into safe mode?

Can the disk be removed and installed in another PC so that you can run chkdsk /f on it?

This article from Microsoft describes some other troubleshooting steps you could try:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324103

As far as the XP install CD is concerned, double check if your BIOS not only has a boot order (obviously CDROM should be first at the moment), but also a boot priority order. If it has the latter try moving the CDROM as the highest priority and the BIOS should go to the CDROM before zonking to the harddrive boot sector.

Once in XP, you can either try a repair MBR from the console, but personally I would choose the system repair option (which appears if you choose install. However this will wipe out all your service pack files, unless the install CD already has service pack 1, 2, 3 included.

Thanks for your suggestions guys... and I have made some limited progress.

I wondered if both my bootable XP CD's were corrupt, unlikely but possible. I only have two bootable XP CD's (thought that would be enough lol!) but after some trawling of the net I found a nice little ISO which provided a bootable CD that allowed entry into the recovery console. I burned that from another machine and sure enough was able to boot from it and get into recovery console on my problem machine. Hooray!

On entry into recovery console it offered up 4 disks - my two internal hard disks C and D, and my two external USB disks E and F. It says it found windows installations on E and F which I don't understand as I've never created bootable partitions on them. Ho hum. Anyway, I pulled those two USB drives out so I was only left with the internal hard disks and rebooted back into recovery console. Now it only found C and D (using the map command)... but with no windows installation on either of them. Also, the dir command fails to work on either of them ("An error occurred during directory enumeration").

What the hell I thought, how bad can it get, so I did a "fixmbr" to try and fix the master boot record. It warned me that I may have an invalid master boot record and asked whether I wanted to proceed, so I said yes, and it said it successfully wrote a new master boot record onto C. Hooray!

Back to reboot.... and.... no luck, same problem. Fixmbr seems to have no effect.

So... any suggestions where I go now? I could understand if it was a disk hardware fault, but on two separate disks, at the same time? I doubt it. What on earth has this OS Selector software done!

Regards

Kim:

XP installation CDs are relative old and don't contain copies of modern SATA chipset drivers. It could be that you need to load an appropriate driver (using F6) while booting to the recovery console. Perhaps that's an explanation for why you are unable to see the contents of your disk(s).

To prove or disprove that theory, can you get a hold of a Windows 7 DVD? It contains thousands of newer drivers compared to an XP disk. If you can boot from a Win 7 (or even a Vista) DVD, then go to a command prompt and try again to view the contents of the C and D partitions.

Another suggestion is to enter BIOS setup while starting your PC. Look for any disk mode settings. There may be a setting for an "IDE Compatibility Mode", which will cause any SATA disks to appear as standard IDE disks. If you see a setting like this, change it to IDE mode and try again. Then the XP CD should be capable of reading them.

I really am having a difficult time understanding what OS Selector could have done, other than modify the MBR code. I doubt that your fixmbr command could have worked if the disks were not enumerated properly when you issued the command. Could you describe your hardware in a little more detail? Is this a desktop or a laptop? Are the disks SATA, or IDE? RAID or non-RAID?

Thanks Mark, and I can report a little more progress...

I managed to get hold of a third bootable XP CD and this one successfully booted, using that I got into the recovery console again. From there I executed a number of reporting commands:

diskpart (without parameters so I just got a report) tells me I have:

286182 MB Disk 0 at Id 0 on bus 0 on atapi [MBR]
I: Partition1 (Inactive (OS/2 Boot Man 4503 MB (329 MB free)
C: Partition2 (Windows) [NTFS] 281679 MB (120802 MB free)
286182 MB Disk 0 at Id 0 on bus 0 on atapi [MBR]
Unpartitioned space 8 MB
D: Partition1 (Work) [NTFS] 286174 MB (285590 MB free)
Unknown Disk
(There is no disk in this drive.)

bootcfg /list reports:

There are currently no boot entries available to display

bootcfg /scan reports:

Total identified Windows installs: 1
[1]: C:\WINDOWS

map reports:

I: FAT32 4502MB \Device\Harddisk0\Partition1
C: NTFS 281678MB \Device\Harddisk0\Partition2
D: NTFS 281673MB \Device\Harddisk1\Partition1
A: \Device\Floppy0
F: \Device\CdRom0
G: \Device\CdRom1
H: \Device\CdRom2

I know the recovery console offers fixboot and fixmbr but I'm really hesitant to use those as I don't have the understanding to know what I'm doing.

For reference my machine is a desktop, XP SP3, AMD FX55.

Regards
Kim

Kim:

It looks like your latest XP CD was capable of accessing the disk correctly, so there should be no harm in using the Recovery Console to do a fixmbr command. This should eliminate any MBR code installed by OS Selector and allow the machine to boot normally. A fixboot command is unnecessary; I doubt is anything would have modified the partition boot record.

If you still get the BSOD then it's likely due to some other cause; probably bad RAM, judging from the error codes.

Fixed!!! Here's how...

I was lucky enough that I had backed up my D drive. I installed a new windows installation on to it and was able to boot into that. From there I could see my C drive and get hold of my product key for Acrosnis disk director.

I installed disk director on my D drive, ran up OS Selector install and selected the remove option (can't remember the exact words but it was basically "remove OS Selector and restore original boot commands". Then I was able to reboot back into my C drive, so I am now back to normal.

The final question for me then is whether to re-install OS Selector...... let me think about that for a nano-second...... noooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!

Mike, thanks for your support

Regards

Kim:

Great! Glad that worked.

For future reference, your serial numbers for Acronis products are available on the "My Account" page of the Acronis web site (provided that you have registered them there).