Recovery Help with WinXP Pro SP3

[BobH]

Advanced senioritis dementius tremenjous overtook me today.

I was running helpful utilities to try to keep the system alert - CCleaner and registry cleaner - when I did something (I still don't know what as I thought I was being very careful) that was very, very wrong. At the point where my computer (the HP laptop; I'm typing this from a Dell desktop) had to be restarted for the changes to be effected, the restart completed but I could no longer get Thunderbird to retrieve mail nor get Firefox to load from any url. I checked all settings that I could think to check and even disabled and re-enabled my wireless network connection. I reached a point where CP would show my connection and a strong signal (confirmed by the tell-tale in the system tray) but I couldn't get TB and FF to work.

At that point I power-failed the cable modem and router before calling my ISP for help. When the modem and router were rebooted, I had the same symptom on my laptop: showing connected to my wireless network with strong signal but could not retrieve email or url. I then called my ISP tech support and we went through some of the same diagnostics I'd tried previously. The tech had me power fail the equipment again and this time - while he monitored the modem responses - the modem failed to connect. He pronounced the problem a bad modem. I then tried to use my wife's desktop which connects wirelessly and it, too, would not connect to the Internet. This seemed to confirm the bad modem diagnosis.

I took the modem in to the ISP's local office (they are also a CATV provider) and swapped it for a new one which I brought home and installed. This desktop, which is connected via a CAT-5 cable to the router, and the wife's desktop (wireless connection) both perform as they should; however, the laptop still would not connect. My conclusion from seeing numerous different error messages is that I somehow clobbered something on the laptop that caused it to lose it's ability to obtain an IP address from the router. I kept trying to reset network options and finally remembered that I should be able to go back to a restore point.

When I rebooted and used the F10 key to give me boot options, I chose the option to open from the last good boot point. Now the laptop won't boot at all but returns to the boot options screen. Choosing any option from that screen brings me back to the boot options screen.

As a last resort, I got out my WinXP SP2 CD and tried to boot from the CD (after using the appropriate F key). The system started loading from the CD but it hangs during loading of IDE drivers).

I'm hoping that I can restore or reinstall the OS without having to reformat the hard drive because my last complete backup is out of date because my backup device firmware failed and I have not yet received its replacement.

Any help will be greatly appreciated and gratefully received.

bh

[StuartR]

...As a last resort, I got out my WinXP SP2 CD and tried to boot from the CD (after using the appropriate F key). The system started loading from the CD but it hangs during loading of IDE drivers)...

This sounds like a hardware fault. I can't think of anything you could change in Windows on your hard drive that would prevent Windows from booting off a CD.

[Doc Watson]

I'd suggest that you pull the drive and slave it to another system to backup your data. Then you could try reinstalling the drive and see if you can boot into Safe Mode. My guess is that you had cCleaner "cleanup your registry" and it borked something. You, of course, made the registry backup offered by cCleaner before allowing it to do it's deed, right ??? If you did, restoring that backup might bring your system back up. I speak from personal experience here.

If no, you've got your data backup and can reformat and restore the backed-up data. HTH.

[viking33]

If you have your boot options set to boot from the CD FIRST, I don't know why you can't do a REPAIR reinstall of XP, without it changing any of your data files?

[BobH]

Thanks for the input, Gentlemen!

I'm beginning to suspect a hardware problem as well.

During one attempt to boot from the WIndows SP2 CD last night, I got messages about missing or corrupt files. The file, pci.sys, was said to be missing (booting from CD) and setupdd.sys could not be found with error code 7 reported. This CD is one published by Microsoft, not one I burned; so I find it difficult to believe that the media is the problem.

I have a USB CD drive that I will install and try to read the XP CD from it.

And, "Yes!" I did make the registry backup as prompted by CCleaner; however without an OS to be able to restore the file, it's useless to me.

More later.

[BobH]

OK! It's later now!

I attached the Samsung portable CD Drive and loaded the WIndows CD. I then powered up the system and pressed the F9 key to select the boot device. The USB CD Drive appeared among the choices (HDD, CD drive, USB CD Drive). I chose the USB CD Drive and the portable CD began to spin and read the CD. The screen lit up blue and showed WIndows SEtup in the upper left. The message line at the bottom began identifying drivers as they were being installed. This proceeded for a minute or so when the power on the laptop shut down, shutting down the portable CD drive as well. The laptop is running from the mains, not the battery and the indicator light shows green indicating that the battery is charged or charging. It would show yellow otherwise.

The only idea that I can come up with is that there is a hardware problem in the laptop, though I haven't a clue what component might be the cause. I can boot a UBCD4 (ultimate boot disk), but I don't know what diagnostics to run. I also have a DOS 6.0 CD that will boot.

Any suggestions?

************************************ UPDATE ***********************

I gave the UBCD a try from the portable USB CD drive. I chose the Windows Setup option and it went into setup but I then got the message: "Setup did no find any hard disk drives installed in your computer."

I guess it's worse than I thought. I'll have to see if I can find a way to run diags on the hard disk. Hmmmmmmmmmm.

[StuartR]

...I'll have to see if I can find a way to run diags on the hard disk...

Some PCs have a hard disk diagnostic in the BIOS.

[BobH]

Let's close this one out.

Just in case anyone else ever googles and lands here, I'm gonna tell you what I discovered (so far).

First, I must confess to having removed Vista from the HP 530 laptop and replaced it with XP SP3. Come to find out, one must disable the SATA support in the BIOS in order to do things with the hard drive. That is a bit of arcane information relevant only to this HP laptop and only to the circumstance of downgrading the OS (at least in HP's mind).

I was able to reboot the OS and run a backup copy to the portable WD Passport drive. But, the problems are not yet fully resolved. Another session with my ISP's tech support desk revealed anomalous readings with their test gear including back signal strength on the input port. There also seems to be some problem pinging the router (an older Linksys WRT54GX2). I'm going to have the guys in the truck here tomorrow pm to get signal strength rectified. If that doesn't solve the problem, I will do a firmware reset on the router and maybe even replace the router with a newer one.

At least for now, I can connect to my ISP via ethernet cable from this desktop (though the laptop and wife's desktop will not connect wirelessly).

If I learn anything worthwhile from the upcoming events, I'll post here for posterity's reference.

Thanks for the help.