pc won't boot after reinstalling winxp

Okay, I had a unrepairable crash in winxp, so a friend of mine had my documents and such backed up, he took my HD with him, then formatted and reinstalled winxp pro. now when I reinstalled the disk into my system, nothing happens except for a blinking cursor on screen...
Anybody who knows what went wrong??

Thx...

 

WinXP may not have the drivers for your motherboard...I had a similiar problem when I tried to put XP on an old gateway. Was it retail xp or OEM? Do you have a system restore disk?

 

In all likelyhood, the Master Boot Record (MBR) is damaged. Formatting the drive does not recreate the MBR, you would need to repartition it.

To repair this without repartitioning and reinstalling, you can use the Windows XP Recovery Console. Use the Windows Setup floppy disks ([Home] [Pro]) or the Windows CD-ROM to start your computer. At the "Welcome to Setup" screen, press F10 or press 'R" to repair.

After you start the Windows Recovery Console, you receive the following message:

Code:

Microsoft Windows(R) Recovery Console

The Recovery Console provides system repair and recovery functionality.
Type EXIT to quit the Recovery Console and restart the computer.

1: C:\WINDOWS

Which Windows Installation would you like to log on to
(To cancel, press ENTER)? 

After you enter the number for the appropriate Windows installation, Windows will then prompt you to enter the Administrator account password. [Note: If you do not get this message, or you are not given any installations to log on to, then you will need to repartition your drive and reinstall Windows.]

After that, you will be given a command prompt. At the command prompt, type "map" (without quotes) and press enter. You will be shown a list of drive letters and their actual location in the machine. Look for the drive that corresponds to the Windows installation you logged into. For example, if you logged into WIndows on the C: drive, look for the line with the C: on it. C: is \Device\Harddisk0\Partition1 on my system. You need to know the hard disk number. The partition number is not important for this.

Next, type "fixmbr \Device\HarddiskX", except replace "HarddiskX" with the correct harddisk number you got from above. You will be given a warning message that it might damage your system, which you should answer Yes to (it's already damaged, so it's fine).

After the fixmbr command completes, type "exit" to reboot the system. Make sure you remove the CD or floppy disk from the drive.

Warning: Certain viruses that inhabit the Master Boot Record area are known to encrypt the Partition Table (data on the drive that says where ond how big C: is). If you have been infected by such a virus, this command will kill the virus, but also the code that would decrypt the Partition Table. This will make the Partition Table completely unreadable, and you will lose access to your partitions. That will require you to reinstall Windws again, but it will likely have killed the virus.

(Note: Some parts of this post taken verbatim from this MS article.)

 

The guy who reinstalled WinXP told me there could be driver conflicts, because of the WinXP installation was performed on another system then mine... could that be it?

thx for the replies...

 

Reinstall it on your system. It is configured for whatever system he installed the HD onto when he loaded the OS, not yours. Just have him back-up your docs and files to CD and put them in after the install.

 

No, it isn't a driver issue. Drivers don't even begin to load until you see the progress bars.

However, if he installed XP on a different system (a generally bad idea on Windows XP unless you're using special installation procedures) then it's possible that the boot.ini file is not pointing to the correct location. You can force the system to recreate a new boot.ini file by going into the Recovery Console and executing "fixboot x:", where x: is the drive that your windows installation is installed on (probably c: ). The message at the start of the Recovery Console where you have to type in the number will tell you the correct drive letter to use.

Did you try my previous suggestion? Were you unable to access the Recovery Console or did the procedure not work? Did you get any error messages?

 

I haven't tried anything yet... But The guy still has my backup on a server where he works, so I'll try to do a repair and if that doesn't work, I'll do a clean install. no files are lost so...
thx for all yr help and I'll let you know how it all went!

 

It might be in your best interest to do a reinstall yourself on your computer. This can avoid future issues. If it is an MBR issue, or a boot.ini issue, as soon as that gets fixed you may then have driver issues causing more headache. I suggest reinstalling the right way.

This is what your friend should have done as well.