Need help making an XP emergency disk

[Ellis Dee]

I need to make a quick boot disk for an XP Home Edition laptop that has a corrupted NTLDR. I found this thread, which seems to answer most of my questions, as well as this article that gives me confidence this fix will work.

HOWEVER, all of that stuff requires a floppy disk, which this laptop does not have. I need to create an emergency CD, not floppy. Any help? How do you "format" a CD so that it's bootable, and how do you get the necessary files on the CD while you're doing it?

Also, just so I'm clear, in the BIOS settings, the boot options are Floppy, Hard Drive, and Optical Drive. Which one will boot from the CD? Optical, right?

[Hairy Bob]

You need to download an ISO image of the operating system, there's one here http://www.answersthatwork.com/Downr..._downloads.htm . Fourth one from the top, Boot CD – Windows XP Emergency Boot CD (XP SP2 Pro & XP SP2 Home) and then burn that as an ISO to a cd. I used InfraRecorder when I had windows and it worked well enough for me, but any decent cd burning software should have the option to write as ISO.

[Ellis Dee]

Okay, that got me further but still no joy. Now it comes up saying it can't find system32\hal.dll. Assuming I can find this file, how can I copy it to the laptop? Windows never load; it just shows a DOS screen telling me hal.dll isn't found, and then it reboots.

I guess what I need is a fully functional boot CD that has the operating system on it. Or, can I somehow burn hal.dll to the boot cd linked above?

Any help would be appreciated.

[Quartz]

Originally Posted by Ellis Dee

Okay, that got me further but still no joy. Now it comes up saying it can't find system32\hal.dll. Assuming I can find this file, how can I copy it to the laptop? Windows never load; it just shows a DOS screen telling me hal.dll isn't found, and then it reboots.

This sounds like you're not booting off the CD. Fortunately this is usually very simple to fix.

Do you have your original XP CD? Then do the following:

Boot off it and bring up the Recovery Console. This is a command prompt, but not the standard XP one.

Run CHKDSK C: /F from the CD. Do not be tempted to do anything else.

Shutdown and reboot. All should be well.

If all is not well and you get a message about windows\system32\config\SOMETHING then you will need to do a manual system restore. Microsoft KB article here. Be very careful.

[Ellis Dee]

Originally Posted by Quartz

Do you have your original XP CD?

Sadly I do not. This is a friend's old laptop, and she'd really like to retrieve her files from it. She has no original disks.

I'm quite comfortable poking around and doing stuff manually, and I'm open to any suggestions.

[Quartz]

Originally Posted by Ellis Dee

Sadly I do not. This is a friend's old laptop, and she'd really like to retrieve her files from it. She has no original disks.

Do you have a Windows XP installation CD? Vista? Windows 7? Any version will work for booting to the recovery console.

[Ellis Dee]

I should be able to dig one up, though it'll be a couple days before I have her laptop again. Thanks much; I'll bump the thread after I take another shot.

[xash]

The easiest way to do this is to get the custom created NTFS for DOS .iso file from bootdisk.com ($4, but worth it). You can then burn the ISO file to CD and boot from CD (optical drive) and get full read/write DOS access to all partitions. It's basically a tweaked MS-DOS environment, so all copy/paste etc will work, and you can connect a USB stick or drive to copy files to the internal HDD, or you could insert the ntldr files directly into the above .ISO before burning the CD(instructions on the site) and then copy them off of the CD to the internal HDD.

[Earl E. Bird]

Boot up with a (free) dedicated recovery CD.
http://freepctech.com/pc/002/files010.shtml
http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd
http://www.diskinternals.com/boot-cd/

I used to use a pre-made BartPE CD that I found somewhere on the net. Nowadays I just use a Ubuntu live CD for recovery and repair tasks.

[Ellis Dee]

Originally Posted by Earl E. Bird

http://www.diskinternals.com/boot-cd/

This looks very promising; I'm building a recovery CD right now and will try it later this afternoon.