XP STALLS

[Guest Gary07]

I asked this before but got no response I can find. My XP home starts to

boot up to the welcome screen but the welcome screen stays grey and does not

boot in. I have lost the cd drive and cannot put in my XP restore disc. Upon

investigation I get the message 'invalid media type reading drive C:' and

'command.com missing.

I can boot to a: but cannot boot from there into c: or d: or e: I just get

the message invalid command. Do I need a new hard drive or what???????????

--

Canadianguy

[Guest Patrick Keenan]

Re: XP STALLS

 

"Gary07" <Gary07@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message

news:65AF78DB-8C3B-4C43-80CC-D7991D0CCE66@microsoft.com...

>I asked this before but got no response I can find. My XP home starts to

> boot up to the welcome screen but the welcome screen stays grey and does

> not

> boot in. I have lost the cd drive and cannot put in my XP restore disc.

> Upon

> investigation I get the message 'invalid media type reading drive C:' and

> 'command.com missing.

> I can boot to a: but cannot boot from there into c: or d: or e: I just

> get

> the message invalid command. Do I need a new hard drive or

> what???????????

> --

> Canadianguy

 

 

The message "invalid media type" indicates a damaged partition table.

 

Yes, it's possible that the drive has failed, or has otherwise been badly

corrupted.

 

There is *no* way that you will get a message of "command.com missing" in an

XP install. Command.com is a file used in DOS and Win9x, and not present

in any version of NT or XP.

 

If you were getting such a message, it would indicate that an attempt was

made to partition and perhaps format the disk using a win9x floppy, or a

failed implementation of a multi-OS system.

 

The short story is that if there is any data on that drive that you wanted

to have any hope of ever recovering, yes, get a new hard disk. Remove the

current one, set it aside, install the new one and install XP and all apps

to it. *Then* you can consider data recovery from the old drive.

 

Booting from the A drive with a Win9x or DOS Boot floppy will usually be of

no value in this context, because most XP hard disks over 40 meg are

formatted NTFS, which those floppies cannot read.

 

I'm not sure what you mean by "have lost the CD drive".

 

HTH

-pk