XP requires CD to boot? Logon jams? ntoskrnl changed?

[Leozack]

I thought I'd seene evrything there is to know wiht XP by now. But then on my very own pc I had the following problem.

I have XP sp2. I installed visual studio 6 and some updates for it and the next time I ran windows update it said I needed an msVM update. Oh well I thought, fair enough, vs6 is old afterall now. So I installed it and rebooted.

To my horror I was presented with the "NTLDR is missing" message. After copying them back to C: from the XP cd and even going into the recovery console and running the fixmbr. But all to no avail - yet - what is this - I forgot to select "boot from cd" ... and it booted! I played around and have reached the scientific conclusion that if the XP cd is in my drive, but I don't boot from it, I can bootup ok. If it's not, I get that error. Argh!

Then a week later whilst I was using my workaround happily (happily?!) I had to reboot again - this time, it got as far as either applying computer settings or applying user settings. I gave it about 10m to sort itself out and it failed. And now it seems if I don't unplug my network cable whislt logging on and plug it back in only once windows has got past that point, will it work. Bare in mind I didn't break my network or anything to achieve this!

Oh, and to top it all off, sygate now reports after I reboot that NTOSKRNL.EXE has been modified, asking should it be allowed to go online. I've done full virus and spyware sweeps and I'm fine as always. I can only assume it's using the one off the XP cd or something crazy?!
All ideas VERY welcome. Just when you thought you'd seen it all

_________________________________
Leozack

MakeUniverse($infinity,1,42);

 

[gpalmer711]

Please dont take offence from this suggestion but it seems the most obvious but has not been mentioned yet. Do you have a floppy disk in your machine? If so remove it and try booting without the CD.

Greg Palmer
Freeware Utilities for Windows Administrators.

http://www.palmersoft.co.uk

 

[gpalmer711]

One other thing, what are your boot preferences in the BIOS set to? i.e. Mine are set to Floppy, CD-Rom, HD1. If yours are set to Floppy, CD-Rom, HD2 then change the last to your correct boot HD.

Greg Palmer
Freeware Utilities for Windows Administrators.

http://www.palmersoft.co.uk

 

[Leozack]

Ok so - to cut a long story short I'd given up on fixing this problem as nothing anyone has suggested helped.
But upon considering buying a new mobo (I don't think I can properly strip 3 SATA's with my abit IS7 - anyone think I can?) I found updated drivers and bios for my board.
So - 1 handy abit windows bios flash with even handier cmos saving feature later, and I rebooted. I bit my tongue, and took out my xp cd (needed to boot round this problem). The result - NO PROBLEM!!! WOOOO!!! So, no more ntldr missing for me then. And what did it take? A bios flash. Ruthless stuff people. Ruthless. As was the mobo beeping cos the pwm alert temp had reset to 0' xD
Thanks for all your ideas, if anyone else has these problems I hope they learn from my pain.

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Leozack

MakeUniverse($infinity,1,42);

 

[BadBigBen]

@leozack - glad you got it fixed... I think we all missed the obvious the BIOS settings, SafeSettings or SMART or BootVirus Check, by flashing the BIOS these settings where reset, besides getting a new BIOS...

Thanx for letting us know...



Ben

If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer...