Q for 21st December

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Every time you try to start Windows XP you get "Windows XP could not start because ....... is missing or corrupt"
You find the file on the CD install disc and copy it to the hard drive, but the next time windows starts up, it provides the same error message for a different file.
What would be a better way to resolve this problem?

A) Reinstall Windows.

B) Repair XP with an in-place installation.

C) Check the boot.ini file

D) Run NTDetect.com

Answer tommorow

 

Hmmm, tricky again, Boycey :hhhmmm

[HIDE]It's not clear if the PC never starts - I will play safe (but probs wrong) and go for A, a clean install. If we knew that the PC booted occasionally, I'd think about B, but A it is.[/HIDE]

 

[hide]C) Check the boot.ini file[/hide]
out on a limb on this as could be read to be more than one possible solution.

 

[hide]Another crafty one, so many possibles ... I'll go for B [/hide]

 

I'd go for
[HIDE]B) Repair XP with an in-place installation. Hopefully saving the customers data[/HIDE]

 

[HIDE]Personaly, I'd do B first.[/HIDE]

 

[HIDE]C its definitely C...clearly a few files were missing during the boot process so the only way to srt this out is looking in the boot.ini file[/HIDE]

 

[hide]i'm thinking C, perhaps the boot.ini file is pointing to the wrong place, and therefore it can't find any of the necessary files.[/hide]

 

[HIDE]I say B, depending upon what an in place installation is.[/HIDE]

 

[HIDE]I will go for B please Bob [/HIDE]

 

[HIDE]For those that have said the boot.ini file is the place to look.

The boot.ini file is in the root of the C: drive, it would be easy enough to view this file by booting up from a DOS boot disk and editing the file using edit C:\boot.ini However, this has a couple of caveats. 1) If the file system is NTFS things get more tricky because a DOS boot disk like a Win9x startup disk cannot read NTFS partitions.

2) the boot.ini file only points to the correct disk/partition to boot the operating system. As you are getting a message saying Windows XP couldn't start and not just file system not found, I presume the boot.ini is pointing to the correct path for the OS mentioned.

Just some thoughts to ponder [/HIDE]

 

Some good points here folks. Exam cram want answer C.

The reason being it contains the pointer for all other windows files....

 

[hide]

hahaha bluerinse thanks for the info. now stop trying to pollute our minds

well Windows couldn't start because the file/s weren't found. and after copying the missing file, there were still more missing.

so it's kinda like installing "a windows component", it tries to look in (cd):\i386, and if the cd isn't there you will get the error msg, so you can assume it's looking in the wrong place (lets say you have a local i386 dir), so you then need to point it in the right direction.

so that's the way i see it with the question, if there are several or more files missing, could it be that boot.ini is simply pointing to the wrong place?[/hide]

 

[HIDE]The best way to resolve this is to back up your files on the problematic XP into a separate Hard drive, then erase the problematic XP then reinstall it again. So my answer is A [/HIDE]

 

[HIDE]Just want to see some of the other answers[/HIDE]

 

Great

 

lol @ Omni okay just to pollute your mind a little bit more, look at this statement..

If it was a mis-configured boot.ini why would the error message change after replacing a file which allegedly wasn't missing?

 

it didn't change, you get the same error message but for a different file.

and as it's unlikely that all the files suddenly went missing, there is a possiblity that boot.ini is simply pointing in the wrong direction, thus the alleged "missing file".

 

yes Omni but my point is that if the boot.ini was not pointing to the correct location for the OS boot files, it would always come up with the same file that it can't find i.e. the first file in the boot up sequence.

lol anyway, that is questions for you. They just lead to more questions