PC won't boot - I think its an NTFS issue, HELP!!

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Hello, i've been at this for about 10 hours now. Googling, mucking around with cables, booting, resetting, blah blah blah. Please can anyone help me with this....

OK. So the last thing that happened before I went to bed last night was an automatic update from MS as I shut down the PC. Not much unusual there. Clean shutdown, all good.

This morning, I turn on the PC (its a desktop) - as soon as it gets to the Windows XP Professional splash screen with the blue bar, the whole system just hard reboots itself.

So i've made the assumption its hard disk related. I slaved the HDD onto a different PC and doing so caused that PC not to be able to boot either, so I put it back where it was.

I read up on some solutions using the recovery console booting from the XP setup CD, but if I try to DIR the volume all I get is "An error occured during directory enumeration". I can FIXMBR and FIXBOOT but neither has resolved the issue. I've read that a CHKDSK will do it, but because the volume can't be read, CHKDSK just hangs the whole system (unless it doesnt have any output, do you know?).

I can't repair windows, I can't reinstall over the top without a reformat - and this is not an option at all. The PC in question is not backed up (my bad), and its got work on there, payment for which is the only thing thats going to allow me to eat!

I got a floppy boot disk from ntfs.com which allows me to examine and read the volume and confirm everything on the disk itself is intact... but I can't move it anywhere - I have no CD burner, and because we're not in windows, i can't copy it over the network.

This is absolutely driving me insane, does anyone know of a way I can sort out my PC? I absolutely hold microsoft responsible for this... not the first time a windows update has ballsed things up, it happened on my laptop before and I had to do a big rollback, but now, its corrupted (i beleive) my NTFS so I cant even boot windows, in any mode..... recovery console appears to be powerless... data loss is NOT an option...

Please please help!
 
You could also see if it will boot in safe mode (press F8 before windows starts to load).
 
Testdisk didnt work

Testdisk didnt do the trick, i've checked things out, rewritten the boot sector etc. The data is there on the disk, it can see it, but windows just can't boot.

I can't get safe mode, or any other mode. I can get the recovery console but I can't list C:, I can list C: using testdisk or NTFS reader, but no other way.

Its infuriating. Any more ideas?
 
(RESOLVED!!! an error occurred during directory enumeration
what felt like a TRAGEDY becomes a success story!)


Okay, windows did not boot up, I was using NON-GUI boot, so I didn't see anything just a black

screen , all I saw was my wireless light turn on, and the computer activity light blinking and my

fan was loud a bit...tried rebooting, tried resetting BIOS to defaults... no good..


Cause: BIOS change? TuneXP?(I ran ultra fast boot..) Disabling some O&O Defrag from startup?
or deltemp.bat (computer tweak which contains
rd /s /q "C:\Documents and Settings\yourname\Local Settings\History"
rd /s /q "C:\Documents and Settings\Default User\Local Settings\History"
rd /s /q "C:\Documents and Settings\yourname\Local Settings\Temp"
I am pretty sure it speeds up boot.
)

(hope this helps someone... )
Steps to Resolution:

Well I first of course tried (by pressing F8 during startup) and selecting safe mode, or last known

good configuration but no use.

In the recovery console on the XP Boot CD (I just shoved my xp cd in , hit f12 and selected boot

from CD-ROM)
I ran fixboot
I ran fixmbr, then ran chkdsk
in recovery console I tried
dir (to list directories)
"an error occurred during directory enumeration."
THe recovery console did not even find c:\windows or anything ...



(for others if dir actually works... and shows your files.. you can use the master-slave approach

to save your data to another place OR --> tried a REPAIR INSTALLATION OF XP-- > OR ... try a new

installation of XP BUT to a different directory... I use
C:/WINDOWSX ... so when I installed fresh installation from XP I installed to C:\windows .. then

eventually deleted that windows folder after fixing boot.ini to say C:\windowsX.

Anyyways I ran chkdsk.. because obviously something was corrupt ...
it was running and took quite awhile at 25% (and "performing additional checking" 3 times)
so I said screw it. I will restart...same problem...
After searching online I realized if I ever wanted to see my data again that CHKDSK will do it.
So i ran the command:
chkdsk /p /r
(with my 120GB hard drive)
from 10pm EST to about 2:27 am EST..
it said windows fixed one or more errors after it finally reached 100%

Lesson: Let the damned chkdsk do its thing(after you run fixboot and fixmbr) and say goodbye to

about 4 hours and 30 minutes of your life.
Well it reached 75% went down to 60% and up to 100% and yay! windows was back.
chkdsk /p /r
saved me!!!
(after it worked I scheduled a scandisk ...)
and as a special reccomendation run PAGEDEFRAG ...
its by microsoft... my c:\windows\config\system is in 11 fragments.,.
maybe thats why it runs so slow..
so ya lets hope for the best.
 
Hi,

since no one has confirmed the solution given here works, I'll do the honours.
Symptons were as follows: WIndows wouldn't boot -> it flashed a blue screen right after the Windows loading screen, followed by an inmediate reboot. Safe mode, Last known good config, start normally, none of those worked.

I had only just formatted my laptop about 2 days ago and my clean install was only just complete. So realising that I'd probably have to format it AGAIN was really frustrating... Anyways, since I couldn't go into safe mode for backups, I figured I'd use the recovery console to put the important stuff on my secondary partition.

When trying to list the files in C:, I got the "An error occured during directory enumeration" error. 3 seconds of Google got me here, so I ran the chkdsk /p /r, which took about a half an hour in total (partition size is about 62Gb). Chkdsk claimed to fix one problem. I did a "dir" again, and BAM -> there it was! All my files listed nicely again. I rebooted with my fingers crossed and sure enough, Windows booted normally :)

Thanks a lot for your solution xsouldeath! You saved me many, many hours of being frustrated.

StijnVDB
 
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