Boot from a fully recovered Windows XP drive? As FILES?

A little background info:

An old laptop running XP got the dreaded "Disk Read Error: Press CTRL+ALT+DELETE to restart.". As this was a friend's laptop, I don't know what he did to cause this. I assume it was a virus, since he was using LimeWire and not very tech-savvy, etc, etc. Running fixmbr, fixboot, chkdsk didn't work from Recovery Console, and various bootable HDD diagnostics said the drive was fine. Pulling out the HDD and plugging it in via IDE-to-USB lead to it actually mounting, but unreadable due to "corrupted file system". Well darn. Just as a safeguard, I made an Acronis "sector by sector" disk image using a bootable seatools cd and saved it onto an external hard drive. I wiped the laptop drive, reinstalled XP, and it's working perfectly.

Except no original data. Time to look into that disk image.

The image was in Acronis .tib, but me actually having Acronis software on my computer, I converted it to .vhd. SUCCESS. Mounting the vhd in disk manager was successful, however, it was in RAW format. DARN. But using Stellar Pheonix NTFS Data Recovery, I literally managed to recover EVERYTHING. I'm not kidding. The program gave me no errors, and I have yet to find a damaged .jpg or .avi in the recovered data. I recovered the user profile, but just so I don't have to mess with scanning the RAW drive again, I pulled EVERYTHING out. Literally everything, even hidden files I didn't know exist in the root folder of C:/. Windows files and all.

So now I have a folder with the literal contents of a disk image. Not corrupted.

Could I create bootable iso of the folder and run it in VMWare? Clone the folder onto an external hard drive and boot it from there?

Or am I crazy for thinking this?

 

Perhaps there's something I can do with the .vhd file then?

 

I haven't really thought about this other than what if you partitioned the laptop drive to give you a second partition large enough to hold all your files from that folder.

Then placed all the files there and set that partition to Active to see if it would boot. Since it was XP, I assume the folder includes a boot.ini, ntldr and ntdetect.com file?

 

It just might! But not unless boot.ini is modified first. This should do it -

Code:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn

 

If was just thinking that trying to get it to boot off the primary HD would be the most reliable way to see if you have all the files necessary to boot. Easeus and Partition Wizard should each be able to shrink the main XP partition without data loss and have free home versions.

Hi, Earthling. If he has a separate boot.ini on the new partition along with the ntdetect and ntldr files it should boot just by making it active.

If he wanted to keep the main partition active then I think modifying his current boot.ini to include the second partition while keeping the line for the original would be best. Something like this with the original still default but the option to test the new partition:

 

I've been thinking and I am wrong about that. The boot.ini on the second partition would have to be modified to either your version or mine. Sorry and thanks for pointing that out!

 

Hi sach2. I shall be intrigued if this works and he doesn't get the dreaded hal.dll. Hope the OP tries it and lets us know :cool