5 windows one harddrive no boot

diroga

diroga

New Member
i have 5 isntalls of windows XP home on the only partion of the harddrive. I get the normall boot menu showing all 5 selections. picking any of them even in the various safe modes gets me a black screen. there is no gatway restore partion or software with the computer. i have no windows recovery CD's. i got some blue screen with blah blah memory dump beforet this happened. i get no blue screen just menu and no boot. i have no idea how to fix this with out format re isntall.
 
The solution there is simple. You can either bring it into the Gateway dealer and pay for them to have the drive cleaned and a single copy of Windows preinstalled for you again or buy a full version copy(OEM for system builders to save on cost) and install Windows fresh that way after a reformat of the drive. If there isn't 5 separate Windows directories like Windows, Window1, WindowXP, etc. with a slight change for a custom install of 5 copies someone edited the boot.ini file to add in the extra lines.

With the drive slaved in another machine you could look to see if that's the case and edit the boot.ini file with NotePad there to remove the extra lines for the duplicate copies. A good drive wipe and clean install would be the best move however.
 
If you have 5 installs of windows then you have (or someone else has) overlayed the OS several times over. You need to wipe that and start over. Contact Gateway and see about ordering a set of restore CDs, or buy an OEM copy of windows, or load Linux on it.
 
When XP goes on unlike previous versions you would have to see a custom install to 5 different folders since the installer will simply delete the previous installation. It doesn't sound like it came that way but someone tried custom installing to see more then one copy go on the drive. Sounds like a mess alright.
 
PC eye said:
When XP goes on unlike previous versions you would have to see a custom install to 5 different folders since the installer will simply delete the previous installation. It doesn't sound like it came that way but someone tried custom installing to see more then one copy go on the drive. Sounds like a mess alright.
Click to expand...

well when you overinstall windows with out erasing the OS, it puts everything in an "old" windows folder, and your boot loader will pick it up. So that is why they show the 5 instances.

It sounds to me like the system is pretty messed up and I would highly recommend cleaning the HD and starting over fresh with a clean load of the OS.
 
well i did do the whole formate install process. but i dont understand why windows would not boot.

in other news. i discovered over 5,000 viruses when i backed up the data. the viruses where trojens and worms containted in exe zip and rar files. most of them appreared to be from kaza limewire and other p2p's. :eek: free music and porn comes at a price....
 
The problem there isn't 5 copies of Windows but one contaminated with bugs! You definitely need a drive wipe and the same for the files you found infected. I would recommend the deletion of anything that was on the drive to avoid reinfecting a cleaned up system all over again.
 
I have te original harddrive as master and the backup drive as slave. So I assume none of the viruses could be activated. When I started copying the files AVG poped up saying you've got virus. Then I did a scan of the backup drive.I used AVG to remove the 5,000+ viruses. I also ran ClamWin and I found some more but it did not seem to remove them. So I am looking for a nother Anti-Virus to clean up house more.

This is not my computer and I am being paid to fix it up. The guy wants his music. I did not drill down to every folder and file. i just copied the my docs and p2p download directories. So I have a mix of files. All the files where from p2p and none were from music files.

I will tell him what happened and highly suggest him not use p2p's and support the artist he likes.

I guess the moral of the story is DONT USE P2P'S TO PIRATE.
 
Well we can't tough that topic since discussion of that is against the forum rules. As far as finding and manually removing viruses you also have to look at what files have been infected. Any found would have to be deleted! House Call Trend Micro's free online scanner can help along with a few others. AVG is good for pointing files that get infected by different types like I-Worms. http://housecall.trendmicro.com/
 
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