How to format drive when unable to start up with xp cd 3

[piaff1]

I am trying to reformat my hard drive. I boot with my windows XP cd and press any key to boot from CD. OK set up menu appears. I press enter to continue set up. I never get much further than this as I either get dmboot.sys corrupted, ntfs.sys could not be found, or setupdd.sys could not be loaded error 7. It then suggests I start up from cd and choose "r", but I can never get to this point. I decided that the best bet would be to reformat disk, but how do I do this if I cant get this far in setup. I have tried another XP Pro disc but have exactly the same problem with this. Please can anyone help?

 

[RobHat]

You could try a win98 Boot disk, you can download it from the net. It will make a bootable floppy disk which has a format command. I can't remember the exact process but this will be something that is documented on the web somewhere.

I am not sure of much else you can do if you have tried different CD's then there is another underlying issue. One of the other guys here may be able to suggest another idea.

Rob

 

[ArizonaGeek]

Use Darik's Boot and Nuke to wipe the drive clean. Much better than a format which doesn't wipe the drive but only mark it as blocks that can be written over. DBaN will clear everything.

Cheers
Rob

The answer is always "PEBKAC!

 

[RobHat]

And there you go the perfect example of one of the other guys being able to suggest another idea lol.

Nice one Rob I shall bare that in mind myself in the future.

Regards

Rob No.2

 

[linney]

Why are you formatting the drive, are there other problems you are having?

To check your RAM.

http://www.memtest86.com/

http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp

http://www.simmtester.com/PAGE/products/doc/docinfo.asp

To check your Hard Drive.

The drive manufacturer will have free diagnostic bootable software to thoroughly check your drive for problems.



See - "You Receive a File Copy Error During Setup"

310064 - HOW TO: Troubleshoot Windows XP Problems During Installation When You Upgrade from Windows 98 or Windows Me

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;310064&FR=1&PA=1&SD=HSCH

Try setting the Bios to any Safe Defaults settings, turning off any Bios Scanning, and removing any external drives or USB drives.

You could also look at copying the Setup files to USB or any FAT partition and seeing if it will run from there in case the CD drive is faulty.

307848 - HOW TO: Start Setup from MS-DOS in Windows XP

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307848&FR=1&PA=1&SD=HSCH

 

[piaff1]

Hi linney,
Thanks for your help. I will try what you suggest. I decided to format drive because on start up my pc gave error message ntfs.sys was corrupt and then closed down and then went into start up close down loop.

I tried to repair using windows xp disc but it would not repair "unable to copy file wmploc.dll and rundll32.exe" so I skipped these files then BSOD "Page fault in non paged area". I tried repair again, this time unable to find system32/drivers/ntfs.sys.

I tried to run recovery console to load new ntfs.sys but unable to load as recovery failed "dac2w2k.sys is corrupted. I tried to reinstall over top, but this wouldn't work either so I repartioned and reformatted drive, removed wireless network card in case this was causing problems, checked all connections, noted memory test on boot up was OK, and then tried to reinstall windows. Error message " setupdd.sys could not be loaded Error 7".

I tried another XP pro CD - same problem. I booted into DOS with CD Rom support using Me disc. I tried to install by running winnt.exe -got message smartdrive not installed - I skipped this as I did not know where to find it. Set up got as far as copying windows files - but after 2 hours nothing happened. At this point I had enough and went to bed!

 

[linney]

See if you can download Smartdrive.exe from here. Put it on your DOS Boot Disk and just run the .exe from there before you start XP Setup.

Windows 98 Boot Disk Contents

http://www.allbootdisks.com/disk_contents/download/98.html

 

[piaff1]

Thank you all for your help. It turned out that one of my memory modules was faulty. I have removed it and am know up and running on half memory. Next job is to buy new memory.