Weird Windows XP Setup problem

[richardm]

Hi -
A friend of mine has reported a strange problem with a Windows XP setup.

He was doing an installation which didn't complete due to a power cut. The installation is sufficiently incomplete that Windows won't start when the machine is booted, which might be expected.

However, it appears to have done enough to make the system get to the point where it restarts itself and continues the installation process, because when he boots from the Setup CD, it begins that second stage, which in turn fails because it is incomplete.

It is definitely booting from the CD, apparently, and there is no interactive stage where he can bail out of the process.

Is there a way of forcing Setup to restart from scratch?

[Wudang]

I think he'll need to start with the HD - can you make a bootable floppy for him, boot from that and use fdisk to reset the hard drive?

[El Greco]

Doesn't pressing F8 while the computer is booting (either from HD or CD) allow him to choose a command-prompt-only option ?

[richardm]

Originally posted by Wudang
I think he'll need to start with the HD - can you make a bootable floppy for him, boot from that and use fdisk to reset the hard drive?


Yeah, I thought of that. Unfortunately he's many miles away, so it would have to be by post. Might come to that yet though!

He does have a bootable disk which was briefly exciting, but it doesn't have fdisk or format on it, and can't find them anywhere else on floppy. And the HD is NTFS so we can't even kill the files with what's built into command.com. And just to compound the hopelessness, there are no CD drivers on the floppy either, so we can't read the appropriate versions off the XP CD (assuming that they are there and not compressed, and assuming that they'll run under whatever version of DOS is on the floppy anyway, which they probably won't).

[richardm]

Originally posted by El Greco
Doesn't pressing F8 while the computer is booting (either from HD or CD) allow him to choose a command-prompt-only option ?

It does - but it's not as simple as it used to be. Just going for the the Command Prompt Only option attempts to load a whole bunch of other stuff - which isn't there due to the incomplete setup - and crashes out.

On a working machine, it even displays a mouse pointer and a login dialog, and then displays the command prompt in a window.

It's really incredibly frustrating.

[Brian]

Does he have a copy of 98 around?
Install an earlier version just to get a working OS. Then wipe the drive and start over with XP.

[richardm]

Originally posted by Brian
Does he have a copy of 98 around?
Install an earlier version just to get a working OS. Then wipe the drive and start over with XP.

He has, in fact. But it's on CD and it's not a bootable one; presumably it's expecting DOS to be present.

[bjornart]

Doesn't sound like it's booting from the CD to me. Then it _should_ have an interactive stage where you could choose between setup, repair or abort.

[richardm]

Originally posted by bjornart
Doesn't sound like it's booting from the CD to me. Then it _should_ have an interactive stage where you could choose between setup, repair or abort.

That was my initial thought. However, he assures me that it is, and has tested it with another bootable CD (sadly, one that only has a memory test on it).

Obviously when you're not there to see what's happening, you can't be quite sure. I remember years ago talking a customer through a problem, and got him to restart the machine. It came back exactly as before - took me a few minutes to figure out that when he said was turning the machine off and on, he was actually turning the monitor off and on. Confusing one, that was.

Anyway, if memory serves there is a point in the Windows setup process where it reboots the machine and then continues from the hard disk. I think that setup is stuck in that phase, and the CD is checking to see whether there's a setup in progress or not, and not offering any interactivity at all.

[richardm]

So, the conversation goes like this...

Me, for about the tenth time today: "Are you sure you don't have any DOS disks lying around, or any of my old toolkits? There used to be loads - have a poke around that disk box".

Him: "Yes, I've looked, but I'll look again. (sounds of clicking disks and musing) Games, pman.exe, printer drivers, ms-dos 6, Thieves and Kings, OPAC, Unit-"

Me: "Hang on a moment. Just go back a couple of disks"

Him: "Printer drivers? I don't think we've even got that printer any more"

Me: "I think I may have found a way out of this problem".

Two minutes later we have booted to DOS setup which has obligingly done the FDISK and format for us, which was nice of it and saved me the trouble of trying to remember how to use FDISK.


So - thanks for the help and advice. We are out of the woods :)

[richardm]

Originally posted by richardm
We are out of the woods :)

.. But have just been run over by a truck.

On restarting Windows Setup, it fails in exactly the same way. So it appears Bjornart was right, and it is RMA number time

:hit:

[davidhorman]

Edited away because you already fixed the problem and the forum software will let me erase my post but not delete it.

David

[Wudang]

Have you tried
fdisk /mbr
wild guess?

[FFed]

Just my two cents in case it helps.
Choose the boot up sequence in the bios to boot from the cd rom, then when it boots from the cd rom it should give you the option to repair the installation. I can't remember this exactly but the first repair option won't work because it says you need something or other. So then continue with the setup and the next step or two will give you the option again to repair. This repair option will work.

[ShowMe]

For future reference:

http://www.bootdisk.com

An incredibly valuable link.

[michaellee]

FFed is correct. Do not select the first offered "repair" choice instead continue as if you are installing XP for the first time. The last screen will offer the choice of "repair".

[Zep]

1. Boot to PC BIOS

2. Do a hard disk low-level format (may take some time)

3. Start XP install from scratch.

[richardm]

Originally posted by FFed
Just my two cents in case it helps.
Choose the boot up sequence in the bios to boot from the cd rom, then when it boots from the cd rom it should give you the option to repair the installation. I can't remember this exactly but the first repair option won't work because it says you need something or other. So then continue with the setup and the next step or two will give you the option again to repair. This repair option will work.


Yeah.. apparently it wasn't offering this though. But I never saw it with my own eyes, so I'm not sure that what I've reported here is genuinely the case.

The installation has, in fact now been successfully completed. Apparently, he booted to DOS again and ran the Win 98 setup program, which offered him the opportunity to format the disk to HPFS (huh? HPFS for Win98? not likely!) and it all worked after that.

My vote is that the XP install was hanging at the Hardware Detect stage, and after I got him to disable the onboard video card, sound card and modem it worked successfully.

But it's like complementary medicine. The right drug corrects the problem, but it's the magnetic necklace that gets the credit. Ho hum!

[richardm]

Originally posted by Zep
1. Boot to PC BIOS

2. Do a hard disk low-level format (may take some time)

3. Start XP install from scratch.


Blimey, do BIOSes still have a low-level format option? I don't want to sound like a smartarse, but I thought of trying that at one desperate point, but rejected it because I didn't think they'd still offer it these days.

Even way back when, it had a reputation for killing hard disks, IIRC.

[Zep]

Originally posted by richardm
Blimey, do BIOSes still have a low-level format option? I don't want to sound like a smartarse, but I thought of trying that at one desperate point, but rejected it because I didn't think they'd still offer it these days.

Even way back when, it had a reputation for killing hard disks, IIRC. It's the newer motherboards that have the automatic HD discovery that usually have low-level formatting options in BIOS as well. The older ones required using the accompanying floppy with the disk-controller diags, etc (i.e. REAL old).

Yes, they can kill HD's sometimes, but it's rare, in my experience. More often than not, the HD was on the way out anyway, and a low-level format simply "confirmed" its demise.

We use this a lot in commercial situations to salvage perfectly good HD's that have been walloped by viruses beyond hope of salvage by the usual means. It's savage but nearly foolproof.

[richardm]

Originally posted by Zep
It's the newer motherboards that have the automatic HD discovery that usually have low-level formatting options in BIOS as well. The older ones required using the accompanying floppy with the disk-controller diags, etc (i.e. REAL old).


I first saw it in the first PC I made, which had a 25MHz 386 SX processor. That motherboard had a low-level format option for the hard disk, and that was in about 1990, I suppose. Selecting the option gave you a fine raft of dire warnings!

[Zep]

Originally posted by richardm I first saw it in the first PC I made, which had a 25MHz 386 SX processor. That motherboard had a low-level format option for the hard disk, and that was in about 1990, I suppose. Selecting the option gave you a fine raft of dire warnings! Not too many years before that, I had to deal with the 8086 and 80286-based stuff, where the disk controller was a separate ISA board, usually from Western Digital (the HD kit was an add-on in those days!). You needed to run the diags off the floppy to "boot" the controller, and it would let you run another diag from the floppy that was a low-level disk formatter. Lose that floppy and you were in serious trouble! And it took FOREVER to format disks too - I vaguely recall a new 20MB (that's twenty megabyte) drive on a PC/XT taking about 5 hours to format - tic...tic...tic...

Yes, it was a good thing that they integrated the disk controllers into the motherboards (but a pity they went for IDE and not SCSI, though) and thus could put all the HD management stuff in BIOS.

[Janus]

The original complaint has been solved but I will add the following in case it clarifies anything.

The windows XP CD bootloader checks the first hard disk on the system for bootable partitions. If a bootable partition is found then the loader prompts the user with words to the effect of "Press any key to boot from the CD-ROM....". Naturally, the loader will only boot the setup program if the user presses the key during a time delay. Otherwise it will boot the first bootable partition on the hard disk.

The user may not see this message if their monitor is unusually slow to resync after the video reset that often occurs just prior to the boot process.

Originally posted by Zep

Yes, it was a good thing that they integrated the disk controllers into the motherboards (but a pity they went for IDE and not SCSI, though) and thus could put all the HD management stuff in BIOS.

Actually there is a BIOS ROM on most (but not all) external controller cards, even old MFM cards. They would not be bootable without a BIOS. UI features were left out to save space. Features such as low level format were accessed by loading the debug utility and calling the correct address.
Today, even the cheapest card can afford to insert its own ui into the boot process.

[Zep]

Originally posted by Janus
Actually there is a BIOS ROM on most (but not all) external controller cards, even old MFM cards. They would not be bootable without a BIOS. UI features were left out to save space. Features such as low level format were accessed by loading the debug utility and calling the correct address.
Today, even the cheapest card can afford to insert its own UI into the boot process. Spot on!

And MFM drives were used in non-PC machines as well (the DEC MicroVAX II, for instance), requiring another set of diags specific to that hardware to do the disk management. For the MV2, incidentally, these diags came either on quad-density single-sided 5.25in floppies (true!) or a 95MB DLT tape (the TK50), and were proprietary to DEC. Further, the format for an MV2 MFM disk was not the same as that for a PC, so they could not be interchanged without being reformatted (been there, done that, got the tattoos).

Like I said, SCSI would have been a FAR better choice initially, but such is life.