XP won't boot. I am ready to give up on computers. (Sorta long, and completely boring)

It is giving me corrupt file error.

CHKDSK doesn’t seem to fix it. I set the boot flag for the C: partition in Dparted, but that doesn’t seem to affect anything either.

Well, I do run as admin, but all the other stuff I do. You are aware that a number of very mainstream websites have been compromised lately? This is my production machine so I only go to pretty safe places. No warez, etc.

This is exactly what I am trying to avoid. It takes me a week to get my system back to normal if I have to start over. Big major pain.

FYI, I don’t personally use Windows, although I do maintain a few Windows machines. I say this as a disclaimer; I’m not in the best position to help you out. But I do use linux and gparted, so I may have some helpful knowledge there. If a question is asked and I can answer, I’ll post again.

Personally, I think you’ve gone about this in a shotgun, trial-and-error way. Sometimes, you get a quick fix that way; often you just bork the system. And I think you’re in the latter category at this point.

It’s still not really clear to me how your system was originally set up and what exactly you did to it. And it’s even less clear to me what state it’s in now. Explicit, quoted error messages are your tech support friends – post them. That is, excusing my lack of knowledge about the bootcfg command, “It is giving me corrupt file error.” likely doesn’t convey the full amount of information available to you (and, by extension, us).

At any rate, and even if you already used teh google about it, perhaps this page on Verifying DMI hangs might help you establish what went wrong originally. Probably not, though, as I think you’ve already mucked around with too much to be able to use any of that. And I feel the need to say again: I find it unbelievable that gparted is responsible for any of this. Think about it – it’s the common tool used by who-knows-how-many linux users. Many of whom are sysadmins, some of whom actually have the knowledge to look at, understand, and fix the damn code. While yes, it’s possible there’s a bug such as you describe, it beggars belief that it would survive.

So, with all that said, I suggest the following three links: MBR repair, MS page about bootcfg, and MS page about corrupt hal.dll. (Is that the error you’re seeing? 'Cuz I sure don’t know – you weren’t explicit!)

Anyway, I’m out, as I doubt I can help any more (if I’ve helped at all). Listen to drachillix and HorseloverFat (not disparaging anyone else, I’ve just always seen both provide excellent information/advice).

And to robby – yes, this is all too common with (Windows) PCs and users (at least, those who don’t take appropriate care and prophylactic measures). I curse Microsoft and the insidious tolerance they’ve instilled in people for rebooting to fix things, “extra” software required to actually use the computer, and the acceptability of periodic and necessary OS reinstallation. Only when I have to clean up the mess, though; for the most part, I’m unaffected. Just sit back, marvel, and enjoy your non-troubles.

Specific errore message from bootcfg /scan-

Is it just me, or are the tools that Microsoft provides to fix problems basically shitty and an exercise in futility?

Again, I have 32 YEARS experience with computers, I used to fix computers for a living, I was in MIS using Novell and R:Base RDBMS for a major private post secondary school processing 1/2 million dollars in financial aid transactions a month, and designed software that interfaced with department of education software. I am not some newbie that fell just fell off the turnip truck. My first computer language was Radio Shack Level II basic. I have programmed in Fortran, C and ADA. I currently work with PHP and MySQL. I also work in 3D animation with Lightwave. For a while I had my own FX studio and set up render farms and NT servers.

But I have never seen anything like the current environment. Legitimate websites are compromised and infecting people. You look at virus software reviews, and the best only get 80 to 90% of infections.

I am typing this now off my Ubuntu partition from my HP laptop that normally boots into Vista, and oddly enough, as much as Vista is hated, I have never had a problem with it and as far as I can tell, it is not infected.

My production desktop running XP pro, OTOH, seems to pick up crap rapidly, even though with automatic updates on, and rebooting, it seems like, once a week (which is fucking annoying, but that is another rant), I get infected pronto. I just redid the system again about two moths ago, and this is really getting old. It is impinging on my ability to earn a living, I am behind on rent, and this is the last thing I need.

I think it is more hostile world out there than it ever has been. No, I don’t do dumb stuff like opening untrusted email. No, I don’t run WAREZ. No, I don’t surf .cz sites for exotic porn. At this point, infections seem to be spreading to users through mainstream websites.

I recently read an interview with one of the early designers of the web, and he admitted to wishing he had done things differently. Paraphrasing: “Back then, we were just exchanging academic information, and we trusted each other. We never dreamed that the protocol would be handling credit card numbers.”

Perhaps it is time to make some fundamental changes in the protocols.

Thank you for that. Perhaps it’ll help someone else point you in the right direction.

I’d like to take this opportunity to say that I don’t doubt your ability to work with (and on) computers. I just think you approached this particular incident incorrectly. (Somewhat understandably, also. I’ve been there myself…but that’s dredging up unpleasant Win9x memories that are better left buried. :D)

Hope you get it fixed; if not, after reinstalling and setting things up the way you like them, start a thread (or PM me) about imaging your disk – using partimage is really easy. And free.

Hey, Win 95 is why I am a greybeard in more than just name! :smiley: Thanks. it may be that I have no choice. I am just sick and tired of being Mr. Fixit, even on my own machines. I would rather use my computer.

I don’t mean to come off as that guy, but I think your frustration is causing you to get a little paranoid.

There’s got to be something you’re doing that’s causing you to have problems like this. Are you sure you don’t have a thumb drive or something with a virus on it, that could be reinfecting you early on despite your efforts? A duplicated install disk that didn’t come from Microsoft that might have been burned by an infected machine? Are you using IE 6? :wink:

The reason that I say this is that there are plenty of us who go pretty much wherever we feel like on the Internet and don’t have these problems. The AV programs on our household network see less action than the Maytag man. The last virus I had to deal with was Stoned from a 5.25" disk, and believe me, we wander pretty far off the paved road sometimes.

The Internet is pretty harmless if you just follow the precautions and don’t have something insidious undermining your efforts, such as infected external media or an unprotected network connection. Nothing’s changed.

Well, it may not have been an infection. There were these directories on D: partition, that could not be deleted by any means, up to and including deleting the partition through disk manager. yoyodyne suggested that those were temp folders placed by various updates of Windows itself, but why in the world would they have any damn business being on the D: partition? And why would they fight to the death to not be deleted? What business is it of Windows to decide what I can and cannot delete? What business is it of Windows to scatter trash willy-nilly on different partitions? I installed Windows on C: partition, and I made a D: partition for the specific purpose of having that be MINE to do with what I want to. After that, I get flags from an antivirus that these are suspicious files/directories. And they sure do look suspicious. Especially when all reasonable attempts to get rid of them are circumvented.

Alas, I can’t run Photoshop and Lightwave from Ubuntu, or Windows would be history. I could run those from OSX, but our OSX box is being used for Final Cut, and we really can’t do everything on that one machine, aside from the fact that my desktop is newer and faster, and thus more suited for 3D rendering tasks than the Mac.

This business where Windows makes all these incomprehensible directory trees at a whim, scattered anywhere Microsoft feels like it, is a travesty. And the fact that Windows Update doesn’t clean up after itself and leaves this poop everywhere is worse. I have never interrupted an update, although updates have damn sure interrupted me, rebooting my machine and trashing all my work anytime Redmond feels the need to push another one. Of course I could turn off "automatic updates’ NOT RECOMMENDED !1!!!0LOL!! :eek::eek::eek::eek: and regain some control, but then I would really be setting myself up for a compromised system, or so the propagandists say.

I guess I could switch to Apple for all future systems, but if enough people do that, then the malware fiends of the world will just start writing more infections for that platform, and we are back to square one!

I like my idea better. The rack for anyone caught writing this crap, and amputate the main sources (eastern block countries, I am looking at you), from the Internet entirely. Does anyone really benefit from Nigeria having a connection to the Internet anyway? Aside, of course, from the banker who is trying to enlist your help to transfer $14,000,000 US? :smiley:

Once your stuff is actually working again, suggest the following:

  1. Install Virtualbox
  2. Install a Linux distro in virtual box
  3. Do all possible surfing in a virtual machine

Not at all. I am pooped and turning in, but I will find you some cites tomorrow, where major name brand websites HAVE been compromised to spread malware. A recent breach that comes to mind, just in the last few weeks was a vulnerablity in SSL between browsers other than Firefox and Paypal, no less, meaning that packets that were presumed secure could be viewed by an intermediary system and harvested for logins and passwords. No website is immune, or can be made 100% immune from hackers. This is a basic tenet of web site security. The best you can do is your best, and to try to keep one step ahead. Paranoia? In the case of the web, it truly* is* the highest state of awareness.

I would also state, that just because you don’t think your system has been compromised, doesn’t mean it hasn’t been. I know of no way to be absolutely certain that you don’t have a virus at any given time. You can only be certain that you don’t have one your particular package is able to detect. And even that assumes that your system wasn’t compromised before your antivirus vendor got around to blocking it. I had a particularly nasty infestation of virumonde, that kept reappearing despite assurances from antivirus software of various stripes that it had been eliminated. The only way I could stop it’s recurrence was to wipe the system down to bare metal and reinstall the whole magilla.

Or just do it all from the laptop I am using now under Ubuntu. That may be where I am headed. I can’t afford to spend a week fighting viri and another week reinstalling everything, only to have a clean system for a couple of weeks before this shit happens again. Again, perhaps if some of these “authors” faced the (albeit slim) chance of once caught, having their bodies slowly stretched until their joints tore loose one by one… There would certainly be no shortage of folks willing to do the grisly work. I myself would be the first one to volunteer for a turn of the wheel. Their cries of agony would be a salve on my soul. :smiley:

Look, Stan, I’ve been a highly regarded systems, real-time, and embedded programmer for 35 years, with a career that included a stint as the chief software engineer for NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center’s aeronautical engineering department, real-time flight simulation, embedded remotely piloted vehicle software, and systems programming. Dryden is located within Edwards Air Force Base, and if you are familiar with the film The Right Stuff, all the experimental aircraft work by Carpenter and Yeager et al. were done there, as was much of the film that covered those events (I worked all the early shuttle landings and even got to meet Chuck Yeager himself when he was at Dryden during shooting; he played a bartender in the movie).

So please trust me when I say that there are far easier methods to get back up and running with your already-owned Windows OS than all that brouhaha described above or switching to some flavor of linux. When it comes to doing critical system-related things properly under Windows, forget freeware or Microsoft tools and plunk down some cash for commercial software that will solve your problems with far less hassle.

First, find 50 bucks and buy: Acronis Disk Director 10 Suite. There are no serious competitors to this product for working with disks and partitions and recovering damaged partitions in situ. Just avoid its Boot Manager (don’t even install it).

Next, find 35 bucks and buy: BootIt NG, the best boot manager I’ve ever encountered. It has quite a number of features, but because it has so many options it can look extremely intimidating and confusing. However, if you stick to the automatic setup, you should be fine. Otherwise, take the time to read the (rather long) user’s guide. BootIt NG will allow you to boot from any bootable partition as the Windows “C:” drive (using your BIOS to put whatever disk contains the Windows partition you want to boot as “C:” first in the boot order will help, but BootIT NG doesn’t even make that mandatory). This is the only tool I’ve encountered that let’s you force which bootable partition will be the “C:” drive.

If a partition contains lost or damaged files and you don’t want to risk recovering that partition in situ as Acronis Disk Director does, then you need to come up with 50 more bucks to buy: ZAR - Zero Assumption Recovery. The Zero Assumption aspect makes it the best software data recovery tool out there. If you’re unlucky, chances are that it’ll only be able to recover file and directory fragments with generic names, but it’s saved my bacon better than anything else in those rare occasions where I need such a tool.

Finally, shell out the bucks for high-quality commercial anti-malware tools. If you choose the installation options properly, you can indeed run multiple anti-malware tools at the same time (even when the vendors insist you can and must not). I’ve got Kaspersky KAV/AVP, Avira AntiVir workstation pro, Spyware Doctor, -and- SUPERantispyware pro running at the same time and I’ve often seen just one or another of those four tools detect and protect me from a particular bit of malware that the others do not recognize (at least not as quickly). I haven’t had a malware infection ever since. Kaspersky’s KAV is particularly valuable in that it informs you, in detail, not only of malware, but of any of thousands of security vulnerabilities that have been detected among thousands of different software products, even those in such ordinary programs like Adobe Reader and Flash player and vast numbers of seemingly simple and ordinary utilities and apps.

While it is true that linux and Macintosh users are not faced with the same level of daily malware combat as are Windows users, the range of well-designed, highly special-purpose and freeware software under Windows is greater by many orders of magnitude than the alternatives. And even back in the days of MacOS 4 through 9, viruses and other malware threats were pretty much a daily threat, too, and that has grown exponentially with the ever-growing popularity of the Mac.

In other words, switching to another OS is no royal road to freedom from malware…

So what you are saying is that in order to run Windows, you need to buy and learn a raft of complex software that costs more than Windows itself. :rolleyes: Makes me want to lump the whole deal and go be a chicken farmer.

I got along for years without this kind of trouble, it just seems in the last couple of years, that malware has really been on the march, and I think the stats back me up on this. It is now at a crisis level, and something needs to change. Yeah, you and I might be able to deal with this in the way that you have outlined, but what about the average user? A lot of our commerce and recreation now DEPENDS on this shit working right, and it seems like it is getting less and less secure. This means that something has to change at a fundamental, probably OS level, or there will be bad times ahead. You would think Microsoft would realize that the whole future of their business model would depend on locking this down, and would expend a tremendous effort to make their OS secure, but it seems their best solution is to slap a new name on their half-ass malware program and call it a day. :rolleyes:

Anyway, thanks for the advice. I will see what I can do after I get some rest. It has been a long and frustrating day.

I’d like to return to the question of why you were unable to format or delete the D: drive/partition. You said “No dice” when you attempted these things. Can you be a little more specific? What exactly happened when you attempted this? And how did you do so?

The one reason I can see that you might be unable to do so is if there are critical Windows files (the swap file, for instance) on the D: drive.

In retrospect, it looks like they were, as yoyodyne suggested, temp folders from an update. I should have left well enough alone. :smack:

Windows would go through the motion of a format, and spend a lot of time with the progress bar, and fail the format at the end, leaving the directories still there. The option of deleting the partition was greyed out in Disk Manager. That is why I resorted to Dparted.

It just bugs the crap out of me that Windows thinks it knows better than I do what should be done, and again, why is it crapping these temp files on my D: drive, with all these directories right at the root? Doesn’t if have enough crap already on C: for all this incomprehensible shit? If I had a E:, F: and G: partition would it crap all over those too? What’s the limit? Why can’t someone at Microsoft get a goddamn clue and say enough of this stupidity?

It seems, like Windows itself, Microsoft is a huge and stumbling monster, outside of anyone’s control. I have seen some of the memos that Gates has written to his developers about all the idiocy, and even he couldn’t get it under control. I have a good suspicion as to why he retired and washed his hands of the whole damn mess. I am sure he is having a lot more fun going around doling out his fortune to worthy causes, than he did at Microsoft in the last few years of his tenure. :wink:

Judging by the outcome of your actions, I think they are right. :wink:

Wait, you are saying a windows disk refused to allow you to delete the partitions on a drive?

Thats just crazy, booting from the install disk is its own little OS that does not care about any kind of flagged files or undeleteable directories. If someone gave me a hard drive that after recovering any mission critical files refused to have all partitions nuked I would start thinking the drive itself is borked.

No, this was from within the OS, not a Windows disk.

Very, very long names with no spaces? These are typically created by Windows itself when applying patches, service packs, and the like and are temporary directories which you should be able to remove, possibly after a reboot.