Laptop With OS Boot Problems (XP)

Working on a friend's laptop (Dell Inspiron6000 with XP Home. It would show the boot options when booting. One was Win XP if this option was selected, it would boot. The other option was a Windows XP Setup. He had apparently tried to reinstall windows due to some other issues. But the computer would boot. I checked the boot.ini and it only listed the Windows XP Home option. Odd.

So, just to make it easy, I disabled the 'time to display list of operating systems:' under System Properties/Startup and Recovery. Smart huh? Now it does not give the annoying boot option screen.:-D It just automatically boots into the Win XP Setup.

All it will do is boot into the blue screen

Windows XP Home Edition Setup

Welcome to Setup

This portion of the Setup program prepares Microsoft Windows XP to run on your computer.

To set up Win XP Press Enter

To repair...

To quit without installing F3


:cry

So, how do I get it back to booting into the installed and working XP OS? I knew I should have had some coffee this morning...

 

You are going to need some type of bootable CD/USB to edit the boot.ini. If you have a Linux Cd it should be fairly simple to edit the time out from 0 to 10 or more seconds.

Or Windows XP CD should get you to recovery console where you could use bootcfg /add to add an extra copy of the XP Home entry which makes it the default entry. Then worry about cleaning up the boot.ini when you are back in Windows. (The load identifier is just a label like "XP Home 2" or such)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/291980

I usually use Linux because I have it available and recovery console doesn't let you manually edit, but recovery console will work using either bootcfg /add or bootcfg/rebuild.

If you need help or want other options let me know.

 

Thanks Sach2. That did the trick. Was able to get into Recovery Console without the disk. I think it was trying to boot off a borked XP install. I had forgotten about the recovery console. :-D I need to get back into the Nix, Windows has spoiled me to just clicking.

 

Linux has gotten pretty much point and click at this point. I can't memorize commands from online documentation, if I wanted to learn Linux commands I would have to buy a paper manual to get a handle on things.

One tip on those boot.ini with an extra boot option is to set timeout to 3 seconds. Not so much time to make you wait but just enough to choose if you need to.

 

Was odd, the boot.ini only showed one option. Fixed now, thanks again. Had a virus, and needed a good registry scan from CCleaner. I set the boot option time to 1 second, you can't even see it.

It is installing Service Pack 3 now. Got to wonder why smart people get their computers like this. Oh well, I will get a couple of cases of beer out of the deal, and he is a good friend.