Bsods At Every Turn

[lukeh53]

So, one of my friends brought me his computer last night, asking for me to fix it.

It is a Dell, with a Dell MB, 2 HDD (one 40GB and the other 20GB), 2 CD drives (neither of which seem to be DVD capable), and a floppy drive, running XP SP1.

On boot, it loads past the DELL logo and into a menu that says something along the lines of:

Windows did not shut down properly etc, etc. I'm sure everyone has seen it.

Any option I choose reboots the computer, and when I choose Start Normally, It loads untill the login screen should come up, then a blue screen appears for a second, then reboot.

the blue screen had error code 000000024 (not sure about the number of 0s), which I looked up and was informed that it is NTFS_FILE_SYSTEM problem http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=228888&sd=RMVP

I looked inside at the HDDs and noticed that only one was plugged in. I plugged the other in and got the same result.

The only change was from unplugging the first and only having the second HDD. The "Windows did not shutdown properly..." menu doesnt come up, and it loads the login screen. after a second, it shows a message saying

The system process "C:\Windows\system32\services.exe" 
Terminated unexpectedly with status code -1073741819. 
The system will now shut down and restart.

It gives a 60 second timer before restart. I read on about the STOP 000000024, and found a general consensus that the fix is to run CHKDSK /r , so i decided to try for a console. So I try to login anyway, hoping adainst hope that i might be able to get a command prompt open before time runs out (seems like a sick game :P ), but no luck. my next thought was of the rescue console in XP install disks, but for some reason the computer wont boot from the CD drive, even after i configured the BIOS to do so.

Any ideas on how to go about this would be greatly appreciated.

--luke

[Sparda]

Would be easier to connect the drives to another computer.

[VaKo]

Copy data to something else, wipe, reinstall the OS, set everything up and copy data back over. If you can't even get safe mode out of this heap 'o shit, then its not worth trying to fix.

[lukeh53]

Sounds like that is all I can do. No one anywhere else on the Internet has a better solution, so to hell with it

[digip]

Copy data to something else, wipe, reinstall the OS, set everything up and copy data back over. If you can't even get safe mode out of this heap 'o shit, then its not worth trying to fix.

That would be my bet too, but first try to fix it with windows. Have you tried booting a windows install cd and doing a repair of the drive, where you can run chkdsk from the repair tools or CLI? There are tools on both the Vista and Windows 7 install disk that will let you run chkdsk as well as just use a command prompt to copy files off(although not as simple as using the gui, stick with xcopy and recursive copying). If when booted in the install disc and the chkdsk repair doesn't work(usually doesnt) due to not being able to read the failing drive, or the drive actually disappears and cant be found after trying to read from it, (which happened to me on a failing drive which would appear randomly under windows) you may have to use a linux disc to forcemount the failing drive.

I would then boot a live linux disc to copy off the data to another drive. You will have to forcemount the drive under linux just to be able to even see your files if the drive is really bad. Had a similar problem happen do me, where windows couldn't even see the drive any longer, everytime windows tried to open or copy a file, the drive would dissapear all together, but using a forcemount under linux, I was able to recover 90% of my files.

Be warned, you may not be able to recover everything off the drive, this is expected. Especially if there were true-crypt volumes anywhere on the drive, as the contents will be completely unreadable due to encryption and often its file structure and size will be missreported after copying it to a new drive and windows will no longer be able to use it.

On a new HDD or exisiting storage device:

mkdir /mnt/somelocaldirectorytosaveto

then mount the bad drives partition

mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/partitionid /mnt/somelocaldirectorytosaveto/ -o force

where /dev/partitionid is the drive having problems. If there are multiple partitions, do one partition at a time, copy files, dismount, then mount and copy the next one. This will be a lengthy process, probably a couple of hours.

Start copying over files, starting with a few small files at a time to see what kind of errors you get. You may see things like "cp: cannot stat ........ Input/output error" or "No such file or directory" for some files, because these are things that will not be able to be recovered due to bad sectors on the failing disc and even though some of them may show up on the new drive, when you go to open them, they will be corrupted, Just be sure to save any output from the console to a text file to you know which files get the star errors, and then check them once back in windows.

Once the cp command is in, it might look like its doing nothing and not show you any results until its finished unless it gets an error. To see that it is working, open a second console and type the df command to see file sizes and periodically check this as you go along. You will see the free space size change if things are working, so this will be an indicator of your progress.

once you see you are able to copy a small amount of files, you can then try larger chunks, or the entire partion:

cp -rf /dev/failddrive/ /mnt/whereyouwantthemstored/

Like I said, this could take hours. I had someone helping me with the process myself, so it took a bit longer not really knowing my linux fu, but for about 500gig of data, it took about s hours to get all the files copied over, being that I had multiple partitions on the same drive, and a ton of errors to sift through. Luckily I also had external backups that I could reconcile the most of the bad files from.

Good luck.

[lukeh53]

I got it fixed. I ended up throwing some parts together from a few old computers that my family had in their various garages. I managed to boot the windows xp install disk and got the recovery console. chkdsk /r seems to have fixed it, it boots up and i can login without problem. The second HDD in it was to far gone for chkdsk it seems. after updating him on the status of his computer, he said just to nuke the second hard drive, so i am DBAN-ing it now. Thanks for the replies, and for anyone else who runs into this all i can say is pray that you can figure out a way to boot CDs.

[General Grievous]

As previously stated, just make sure a piece of hardware is good... then move on to the next supposed/intuited problem.