Dell Vostro running Windows XP Pro Service Pack 3
My machine will only boot as far as the Advanced Boot Options screen. I’m desperate to get it back working.
What happened:
I did Start>Turn Off Computer..>Turn Off as I always do at night. In the morning I discovered the computer had not shut down. The desktop was empty (ie. no desktop icons) and there was a box saying some program (didn’t note what it was) was not responding. I clicked on the box’s terminate button. Then the computer just sat there doing nothing so I turned it off at its power button, paused for a moment, and then pressed it again to boot the computer. It booted to the “Advanced boot options” screen. I tried all the boot options listed, including “Start Windows Normally”, “Last Known Good Configuration …”, and “Safe mode”. All of them just return me to the same options page.
What I’ve tried:
I booted from the Dell XP install disk hoping to do a repair. Following instructions on Dell’s support pages (and elsewhere), I got to the screen that should offer the repair option but it only gives the following options.
To set up Windows XP on the selected item, press ENTER
To create a partition in the unpartitioned space, press C
To delete the selected partition, press D.
The screen also lists items as follows.
476938 MB Disk 0 at Id 0 on bus 0 on iastor (MBR)
-: Partition1 [FAT] 94 MB <84 MB free>
C: Partition2 [Unknown] 476843 MB <476843 MB free>
Presumably it is not offering me a repair option because it is not recognising that XP is already there (hence the “Unknown” status).
I then rebooted from the CD and this time went into Recovery Console. I get a C:\> prompt at the caret but when I enter “dir” I get “An error occurred during directory enumeration”. I also tried doing “cd directory_name” using a directory name I know should exist but this too fails.
Then I ran a load of diagnostics. Following instructions on Dell’s support pages I booted and pressed F12 which got me to what I think they call “One time boot menu”. As per instructions I selected “Pre-boot System Assessment (PSA+)”. This ran and said no problems and then took me into a graphics screen with several option buttons. I ran “Test memory” and “Test system”. This latter took me to another set of buttons. I did “Express Test”. This gave one message, “Error Code 0F00: 133C”, Msg: DISK – No suitable disk media is present” – I suspect this must be because at this stage I had no CD in the disk slot.
Then I selected “Symptom Tree”, which gave a set of tests under “Tests for cannot boot the OS”. I ran all these tests and it got a green tick for every one – ran for hours into late evening.
Apologies for the long posting but I’ve tried to give a comprehensive account of what happened. I’m desperate to get the machine back without having to do a fresh install and have all the hassle of reinstalling all software. It seems such a trivial thing that caused the problem – surely just turning off the machine couldn’t have trashed the existing installation, could it?
Keith
