Recovery Console - Comments Page 2

Hi Bob - I am accessing the recovery console by using a friends Windows XP disk (I only have the PCs Recovery disk), so when I press R for Recovery console it goes to another blue screen & message at bottom of screen says examining my hard drive - it did this for a few minutes before I switched PC off - should I wait longer or do you think it has hung up at this point? Thanks --- Bruce

EDITOR'S NOTE: What can you lose by waiting longer? That's what I would do...

Ok Bob I waited a bit longer - 12 hrs in fact & still message sat there saying it was examining the 60GB drive!! So have switched off. Any other ideas on how to get Recovery console running - reason I need this is that my PC was crashed by someone switching the power off whilst it was booting!!! Want to get into it & sort out some of the Windows files so that it will boot or recover to an earlier point? Thanks --- Bruce

EDITOR'S NOTE: Can you boot from the Windows CD and do a Repair?

Hi Bob. I seem to be having the same problems that Marados is having. My 200 gb SATA drive won’t boot, and recovery console tells me there is no drive present. Although, if I install this drive as a slave to an 80 gb IDE dive, it is fully accessible. My guess is a corrupt MBR, but I cannot access it. Is there a way to manually fix the MBR if I cannot boot the drive?

EDITOR'S NOTE: Both FIXBOOT and FIXMBR accept optional parameters to specify which drive you want.

It should be noted that many people new to the recovery console get stuck trying to login when requested to "Type the Administrator Password". Most systems (in my experience) don't require a password at this point and simply hitting enter will do.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Yes, that was mentioned in the first comment as well.

I get to the prompt of 'Which Windows installation would you like to log onto'. There's a list containing just C:\WINDOWS. So I enter '1' followed by . Keyboard loses control, but there's no response on screen and nothing happens even if machine is left for hours. Any help much appreciated.

I am trying to boot to recovery console but I do not get the prompt to login in a windows installation. It just goes directly to the C:\ prompt. Any commands entered comes back with -- cannot find a windows installation. Can anyone tell me what the heck is going on?

EDITOR'S NOTE: Did you boot from the Windows setup CD?

Hi, I'm trying to access the recovery console booting my laptop with a winxp CD. At the password prompt, I've used blank by just striking the enter key, used the password i log onto xp with, neither worked. i just needed to replace a corrupt/missing file 'ntoskrnl.exe'. can someone help please!

I am having the same problem that chyo is having. My windows xp disk will not read, even when BIOS is set up to read cd drive. I get a windows will not start screen, and when going to start normally option, I get a blue screen saying I have a registry file failure problem. I used a floppy boot disk to read floppy drive, but can't acess cd drive on my laptop. What should I do?

EDITOR'S NOTE: Did the system start booting from the CD? Does the CD work in another computer?

I've got the same problem as 'kneedhelp': can't boot from cd drive - the disk does work in my other computer - and get a blue screen reading: STOP: c0000218 (registry file failure). the registry cannot load the hive (file):\systemroot\system32\config\software -- and then it begins to dump. When finished it takes me back to the start again. What can I do?

EDITOR'S NOTE: Again, it appears that you are actually booting from the hard drive, and not the CD. You may need to enter the Setup (BIOS) screens and explicitly tell it to look for the CDROM drive first when booting.

Yesterday my computer started hanging up when I was trying to close Firefox. I cut it off manually and now when Windows starts, it asks me if I want to start in Windows XP Home Edition or if I want to use the Recovery Console. How do I stop that screen from coming up? Thanks.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Try running the "CHKDSK C: /F /R" command to find and fix errors on the disk.