[RESOLVED] Laptop boot sector messed up (I assume) - what can I do?

[Lord Orwell]

to get the repair option from an xp cd, you need to choose to install it from booting from the cd. Eventually after you tell it about 3 or 4 times you're installing a new version of windows it searches for old versions and tells you "found another install of xp. Do you wish to repair or replace?" or somethign simliar. I just did an xp install 2 days ago. It's there. the option is NOT available from the graphical install.

[ShaunC193]

I did a repair, and nothing. T_T Still the black screen and a cursor. This is really frustrating. It had everything I needed on it, and now I'm going to have to reinstall it all if I can find it. I guess I might want to back up the data. Thing is, the best backup medium is a 4GB USB drive and I store all of my college work on it - I don't want to mess around with it. I might just hook it up to my PC via ethernet and see if it's possible to transfer over a network from Ubuntu to XP.

[Lord Orwell]

you have another option. You can do a new install but install to a different directory.

[randem]

That's Windows for you... Different ways to access the file system and they offer opposite diagnostics...

When you ran chkdsk what happened?

[ShaunC193]

Sorry about the late response guys. The problem is now resolved. I managed to borrow my girlfriend's 500GB HD. I backed up my data onto it and reformatted. However, I regret installing TinyXP on it. There's a noticeable performance boost, but it's frozen a few times, and worst of all, our beloved VB6 has compatibility issues and most ActiveX controls are missing. Time for reformat #2, eh?

Thanks everyone.

p.s. As for chkdsk, it did what it did before. It went back to 50% a few times, so it must have been fixing errors.

[visualAd]

Glad to see you took my advice and didn't download a pirated copy of XP.

[ShaunC193]

Actually, you're absolutely wrong. About half a year ago, I followed a tutorial on the internet to build my own TinyXP using Nlite. It involves using your own copy of XP and is 100% legal, so you don't have to get anal about legal issues.

[Lord Orwell]

i dont think he was being sarcastic. Tinyxp is well known and there's also a version for vista that lets it fit on one disk.

[ShaunC193]

Oh... I assumed he was, because TinyXP is illegal if you don't build it yourself, and I wouldn't blame him for thinking I got it from a torrent. I've also heard about TinyVista - though it kind of defeats the point of using the bloated OS! I can't see why anyone would use Vista for anything other than the eye candy.

[visualAd]

Oh... I assumed he was, because TinyXP is illegal if you don't build it yourself, and I wouldn't blame him for thinking I got it from a torrent. I've also heard about TinyVista - though it kind of defeats the point of using the bloated OS! I can't see why anyone would use Vista for anything other than the eye candy.

I wonder what you call a message that can be interpreted as both sarcastic and serious at the same time?

I guess you will never know what I truly meant in that post

[ShaunC193]

I guess not. Reading between the lines is hardly my forte.

[Lord Orwell]

you think vista is eye candy? Most people find the black theme hideous. And it's well known that the eye candy can be given to xp. I had mine done up like that for test purposes until i installed sp3, which among other things undid nearly every system change including unpatching the theme file.

Evidently everyone's all gung-ho on directx 10 (which i also have on xp) and iis7 which will never be ported. Although for that matter if i merely wanted iis7 i would go server 2008.

[ShaunC193]

Yes, wasn't the DirectX 10 ported by Falling Leaf Systems who intended to get DX10 games such as Halo 2 running on XP? (And they succeeded, to some extent.) By the way, my girlfriend is fortunate enough to have two computers: a Vista computer (that's quite fast) and an older XP system. The XP system has SP3 with this Vista theme you're talking about.

But it looks nothing like Vista. It just looks like a bog-standard skin. The aero glass theme is impossible to get on XP, so the eye candy just cannot be cloned. To be honest, I do prefer Vista's theme more than Windows XP's default Luna colour scheme as shown in your screenshot, which looks kind of ugly. I usually end up changing it to olive or silver.

By the way, why use IE? Get Firefox, or better yet, get Opera which has been free for a while. It's secure and fast, and has heaps of features. (Many of which you'll actually find you've needed.)

[randem]

Isn't this waaaaaayyyyyyy off topic?

[ShaunC193]

Yes, sorry. Got a bit carried away.

[Lord Orwell]

yes it is, but i happen to have aero glass on xp. I am just not using it.