MS-DOS Boot Disk XP

[goboy]

Hi.

My PC has stopped booting into XP... it gets so far and restarts in a constant loop. I have created an MS-DOS startup disk for Windows XP using my other computer. It gets into the command prompt, where it reaches "A:\" then stops which is all perfectly fine and normal. On this machine there are two 200gb SATA hard drives. Windows XP sits on the primary hard drive, the secondary is used for documents etc.

I have exhausted all possible solutions and contacted technical support and am confident that the hard drive will have to be re-built and restored using the recovery option installed on the machine. However there are some documents on the C: drive which I need to back-up to the D: drive.

The recovery solution only allows me for complete 'reformat' and 'rebuild' it would normally give me an option to preserve the Documents and Settings folder but because the XP installation is so badly corrupted that is a no-go area and I want the documents moved to the other drive, without taking the hard drive out of the computer and putting it into another computer.

The problem with the MS-DOS start-up disc which I have created is that it will not read the two other hard drives, so the batch file I have created using the command xcopy is pretty much inefective. How do I get the boot disk to enable all the drives which are active in my machine, without booting into Xp which obviously does not work anyway?

Thanks,

Goboy

 

[Ididmyc600]

Hi.

My PC has stopped booting into XP... it gets so far and restarts in a constant loop. I have created an MS-DOS startup disk for Windows XP using my other computer. It gets into the command prompt, where it reaches "A:\" then stops which is all perfectly fine and normal. On this machine there are two 200gb SATA hard drives. Windows XP sits on the primary hard drive, the secondary is used for documents etc.

I have exhausted all possible solutions and contacted technical support and am confident that the hard drive will have to be re-built and restored using the recovery option installed on the machine. However there are some documents on the C: drive which I need to back-up to the D: drive.

The recovery solution only allows me for complete 'reformat' and 'rebuild' it would normally give me an option to preserve the Documents and Settings folder but because the XP installation is so badly corrupted that is a no-go area and I want the documents moved to the other drive, without taking the hard drive out of the computer and putting it into another computer.

The problem with the MS-DOS start-up disc which I have created is that it will not read the two other hard drives, so the batch file I have created using the command xcopy is pretty much inefective. How do I get the boot disk to enable all the drives which are active in my machine, without booting into Xp which obviously does not work anyway?

Thanks,

Goboy

Hi

I do believe that you cannot see SATA drives from a DOS environment, as special drivers need to be installed, i may be wrong.

You say however that there is a rebuild option, this should just restore the faulty files, however it will create a new administrator account and a few other bits, but it may be the answer.

regards

 

[Nodsu]

DOS should work with non-RAID SATA. DOS does not work with NTFS, which happens to be the default Windows XP filesystem.

I would recommend a CD Linux like Knoppix or INSERT. These work with SATA and NTFS. You can drag and drop your files as you like.