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superkdogg
Gawd
- Joined
- Oct 14, 2004
- Messages
- 743
I have a machine for a friend that wouldn't boot into Windows. It uses an ATA raid card (raid0 of course-just to make this more difficult!) and has Win XP Home striped on a 2x80 array.
Well, first off he doesn't know his Admin password so a normal Recovery Console situation is a non-possbility. Second, the raid array prevents me from resetting the password, because I can't find a reset tool or boot disk that supports his Silicone Image 580 (680?-who cares) controller card so all the password reset tools think that both drives have invalid partitions.
So, I remove the controller card and drives and scan them for errors in another machine. This goes well although it takes forever-19 GB of data took about 1.5 hours to check and only a few changes were made although one thing that was changed was in the system32 folder with the filename listed as "(null)" which I found interesting.
Even after that, when I put the array and card back into his machine it would not boot. Just whent the splash screen should come up, it automatically reboots. This is after scanning for errors, and was also the situation before scanning. There's no difference if I try safe mode-same thing happens.
I am tempted to make a backup of his important data and nuke his whole disk setup including the array and reinstall.
Does anybody know any other steps I should take to try to repair his existing installation prior to starting over from scratch? If so, I'd appreciate it.
Well, first off he doesn't know his Admin password so a normal Recovery Console situation is a non-possbility. Second, the raid array prevents me from resetting the password, because I can't find a reset tool or boot disk that supports his Silicone Image 580 (680?-who cares) controller card so all the password reset tools think that both drives have invalid partitions.
So, I remove the controller card and drives and scan them for errors in another machine. This goes well although it takes forever-19 GB of data took about 1.5 hours to check and only a few changes were made although one thing that was changed was in the system32 folder with the filename listed as "(null)" which I found interesting.
Even after that, when I put the array and card back into his machine it would not boot. Just whent the splash screen should come up, it automatically reboots. This is after scanning for errors, and was also the situation before scanning. There's no difference if I try safe mode-same thing happens.
I am tempted to make a backup of his important data and nuke his whole disk setup including the array and reinstall.
Does anybody know any other steps I should take to try to repair his existing installation prior to starting over from scratch? If so, I'd appreciate it.