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Hi everybody and welcome to my blog!
Today I’m gonna give you something that probably only PC technicians know, and I know that this will come in very handy for those of you have issues with Windows XP start-up.
Now, I have noticed that there a lot of people out there that are having a hard time getting XP to load properly, due to corrupted files caused by viruses, or due to bad sectors caused by power failures. But if you have a Windows XP installation CD and you are ready to use it to format your PC or laptop, which I'm sure is a painful procedure for all of us, you should try this 1st:
Windows XP installation CD comes with Recovery Console, a very handy tool that technicians use to recover bad sectors on a hard drive or repair system files and XP installation. So, before you go to the last option and format your hard drive and reinstall your OS, do this:
1. Insert your Windows XP installation CD to your CD drive and restart your computer.
2. Wait 'till the boot CD loads, and when the blue screen shows up for XP installation, press "R" on your keyboard.
3. At this point, the Recovery Console loads. It will ask you which Windows installation to choose for repair. That's usually number 1. So you press on your keyboard the "1" key.
4. Type chkdsk.
5. Now it will probably tell you that your Windows installation /HDD seems ok and it won't check for errors. (Don't mind that, machines just don't know any better! :)) To bypass that, and check for hard drive errors anyway, type chkdsk /p .
6. When it finishes, it will probably tell you that it found errrors. To repair those errors, type chkdsk /r .
7. It'll take a while, so be patient. When it finishes, restart your computer and see if it loads normally.
What this procedure does is to check the hard drive for errors and for bad sectors, and with the /r parameter we command the system to repair those errors. Now, if your system isn't in that bad condition and chkdsk repairs the errors successfully, it'll probably load ok. If chkdsk gives the message that the errors are "unrecoverable", then that could possibly mean that either your hard drive is in such a bad state and you're gonna have to replace it (Yikes!), or that we're gonna have to proceed in formatting it anyway, because Windows installation is too corrupted.
Now, don't think that this is the end of our lesson for Recovery Console. There are other things you can try as well to repair your Windows installation and make it boot up normally. So, stay tuned for Windows XP Recovery Console Part 2, which I will give you a few commands that I personally can't live without and saved me a thousand times from formatting the hard drive.
Until then, have a nice day!