diagnosing windows

[Richard Claypool]

Hi,

 

My msi wind's on the flake.  It decided not to boot up into windows, but I can see both partitions just fine.  I'm assuming that I could still boot from the drive and it's not a hardware problem.

 

What utilities should I use to check the drive?  I found a drive check program, but it claimed not to be able to read the drive, and gave a totally wrong size for the drive.

 

The wind bots, and gives me a choice of booting into windows, safe mode, or bios.  Neither windows nor safe mode windows will pop up.

 

I could reinstall windows from scratch, but would prefer to try to fix it.  I could put vinux onto it, but that machine is a far faster machine, so would rather run vinux on the slower machine.

 

I feel more comfortable working in the command line when doing work.

 

I hope this is ok to ask here since it does involve vinux.

 

[Mobeen Iqbal]

Hi. i'm not sure how to do this directly from vinux, but could you perhaps try restoring the MBR?

Mo.


Richard Claypool wrote:

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[Richard Claypool]

That would be occomplished through bios right?  I only have a 12 year old kid here to read the screen, and he's not a geek.  If it can be done through linux, how would I occomplish this task?

 

Is there a chance that the problem is hardware, and if so, how would I tel?  I'm suspecting not because I can see the drive, I can read/write to both partitions, but I've never had a situation like this come up.  Is there a utility I could run to check?

 

I've let it sit here for a month or so because any time before now, I'd have quite happily tossed it against the wal lol.  Plus, other personal things have come up.

 

It's a gift from someone, so I don't want to barge ahead like I would, had I spent the money on it.

[Mobeen Iqbal]

hi richard. as i said i'm not 100% sure how to do with linux. had it been my own system i'd probably have risked it. was it windows vista or 7 or xp on there? when windows hasn't come up at all, its either been because windows7 is stuck in stand by, or the installation's corrupted. do you know if the pc perhaps went to stand by? take your battery out. unplug from mains. let power drain for 10 minutes or so, perhaps hold the power button in for 30 seconds to drain the board as well. then plug back in and turn it on, and leave it to do what it wants and hope the thing responds.  if that doesn't work, let me know and i'll see if i can confirm instructions for you 100% using a windows installation. it doesn't sound like a hardware fault at all. if it was, you wouldn't be able to read from the hard disk at all or indeed get the thing to boot or to bios state.  the mbr is restored by booting from a windows CD, but if this thing's a windows netbook you wouldn't have a cd drive built in. my last suggestion is recovery mode. MSI will probably have built in a recovery system of their own. back up your files using vinux before hand. then see if you can start the recovery program. when you first turn the pc on, tap f8, f11, f12, not all together but if one doesn't work then turn off and try another or look at the manual.  one of those should in theory get you in to recovery mode and allow you to run system restore or restore to factory defaults which will wipe windows. consult your manual or google it first if you're not sure how to get in to recovery. for example on acer's, you hit alt f10 on boot repeatedly to enter recovery mode. 

HTH! 


Mo.

[Richard Claypool]

Hi,

 

It's not in stand by.  windows just isn't booting.

 

is there a disc diagnostic tool I can use that will check for erors?

[Richard Claypool]

Hi,

 

 

that older model came with recovery discs, but not onboard recovery.  I'm screwed as far as that goes.  

 

it's windows xp.

[Don Marang]

 Which version of Windows is installed?  Do you have the full Windows installation disks?  If so, it may be possible to insert the installation disk, and just before it is ready to install, it notices that Windows is already installed on the disk and asks if you want to Repair the disk instead.  Unfortunately, none of this can be done without sighted assistance! 

 

On the other hand, there are a variety of Linux recovery utilities.  There should be one that can check your Windows NTSF partitions and MBR.  I wrote instructions on the Vinux Wicky to Create a Vinux Rescue DVD.  Step 24tells you how to install many Linux recovery type packages.  The package 'testdisk' sounds very promising for your predictament.  Once it is installed, type 'man testdisk', for more information on it's use. 

 

http://wiki.vinuxvirtual.org.uk/index.php?title=Vinux_How-To_Page#Create_a_Vinux_Rescue_DVD_Which_Includes_Image_for_Linux

 

testdisk - Partition scanner and disk recovery tool
 TestDisk checks the partition and boot sectors of your disks.
 It is very useful in recovering lost partitions.
 It works with :
 * DOS/Windows FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32
 * NTFS ( Windows NT/2K/XP )
 * Linux Ext2 and Ext3
 * BeFS ( BeOS )
 * BSD disklabel ( FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD )
 * CramFS (Compressed File System)
 * HFS and HFS+, Hierarchical File System
 * JFS, IBM's Journaled File System
 * Linux Raid
 * Linux Swap (versions 1 and 2)
 * LVM and LVM2, Linux Logical Volume Manager
 * Netware NSS
 * ReiserFS 3.5 and 3.6
 * Sun Solaris i386 disklabel
 * UFS and UFS2 (Sun/BSD/...)
 * XFS, SGI's Journaled File System
 .
 PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover
 lost pictures from digital camera memory or even Hard Disks.
 It has been extended to search also for non audio/video headers.
 It searchs for
 * Sun/NeXT audio data (.au)
 * RIFF audio/video (.avi/.wav)
 * BMP bitmap (.bmp)
 * bzip2 compressed data (.bz2)
 * Source code written in C (.c)
 * Canon Raw picture (.crw)
 * Canon catalog (.ctg)
 * FAT subdirectory
 * Microsoft Office Document (.doc)
 * Nikon dsc (.dsc)
 * HTML page (.html)
 * JPEG picture (.jpg)
 * MOV video (.mov)
 * MP3 audio (MPEG ADTS, layer III, v1) (.mp3)
 * Moving Picture Experts Group video (.mpg)
 * Minolta Raw picture (.mrw)
 * Olympus Raw Format picture (.orf)
 * Portable Document Format (.pdf)
 * Perl script (.pl)
 * Portable Network Graphics (.png)
 * Raw Fujifilm picture (.raf)
 * Contax picture (.raw)
 * Rollei picture (.rdc)
 * Rich Text Format (.rtf)
 * Shell script (.sh)
 * Tar archive (.tar )
 * Tag Image File Format (.tiff)
 * Microsoft ASF (.wma)
 * Sigma/Foveon X3 raw picture (.x3f)
 * zip archive (.zip)

Don Marang

 

There is just so much stuff in the world that, to me, is devoid of any real substance, value, and content that I just try to make sure that I am working on things that matter.
Dean Kamen

[Richard Claypool]

Hi,

 

windows xp, and no, and I don't have a usb cdrom drive.  I could reinstall by making a usb self install from a copy I do have, but I'd rather try to fix before reinstalling.  Doing this on netboks is a chancey thng, most of all on a usb stick.