Compaq Box - ME to XP upgrade problems

[theocpcguru]

Ok guys here is the skinny. My friend is in a world of trouble and is calling upon me for my supreme experience.... Well... she is calling on me cause I won't charge her. She got a compaq machine with ME and decided to put XP on it for her friend. After installing XP (not sure how she did it) it gets an error message about the NTLDR being corrupted and spits out some of the code from the boot.ini file. I haven't seen it but it appears to be the string in boot.ini that points to the drive and partition to boot from. This happened AFTER installing XP on top of ME. Since then, I have directed her to format the hard drive and re-install. I have instructed her to FDisk the drive to delete and FAT32 or Non-Dos partitions. She has done so and repartitioned the drive and re-installed windows... same problem. Always gets the error after booting to the hard drive after windows has copied files and goes into GUI mode for the install. I have had her use the recovery console from the disk and use the FIXBOOT and FIXMBR commands, as well as copy NTLDR from the CD. None of this has worked. Now, she's calling in the "big guns" and I need to go help. In my situaiton, what would be the first thing to check? I've thought about just about everything that I can think of and I'm not really sure as where to go from here. I'm sure that with time I can fix it, but I don't want to spend 10 hours working on this... especially for free....


Please let me know....

[meese]

Maybe this MS KB article can help?

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;314057

[theocpcguru]

Thanks for the tip. Unfortunately, I don't think this will fix it. You see, the drive has been formatted NTFS 10 times since upgrading it to XP. I have also manually overwritten the NTLDR with a copy from the I386 folder on the XP cd. Next?

[HaroldW]

Theocpcguru:

Be advised, even if you get it working right it may only last for thirty days. I doubt your friend is aware of the XP "activation" issues. She has probably already installed that copy of XP on another system. If so, it won't activate on a second system. With all Windows operating systems for each copy you buy you are only licensed to install it on one system unless you buy additional licenses. With Windows XP they brought in the activation step which makes it very hard to bypassing the activation features and successfully installing a usable OS on two systems for greater than thirty days (They give you thirty days after installation to activate on one system. After that the system no longer boots properly, or you can no longer login properly.)

Believe it or not, one of my biggest problems with installing XP has come from the video subsystem. I keep an ATI rage 128 PCI video card to install XP, then when it's installed I reinstall the offensive video card.

Hope this helps.

[theocpcguru]

Thanks harold for pointing out the activation issues. This was a clean copy of XP. I looked at the system last night and it has the same video card that I do, and I installed Xp on my system without a hitch. I tried all the obvious recovery console commands and couldn't get it fixed, so I deleted the partitions and made a new one formatted FAT32 with the windows 98 system files (formatted /s from dos prompt) and also FDISK /mbr and restarted system and got back to the DOS prompt, so I fixed any problems with the boot record. Installed XP back on top of it, and on the first restart got the same NTLDR message. I manually edited the boot.ini file to make sure that it was pointing to the correct drive and partition. Still no go. Formatted and re-installed 98se. I really didn't even want to put XP on that machine because it's only a 750 mhz 64mb ram. XP would have choked that machine with just 64 ram. Resolution to the story.... machine is now running flawlessly on windows 98se. My friend was just happy that it didn't have ME anymore...

[meese]

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