Unistall XP Updates from Prompt???

[wh427]

Hey everyone! I'll try to make a long story short here... I've currently got a PC that won't boot into Win XP. It gets to the splash screen and hangs there. I've done a bunch of searching around on the net and found that a Windows Update (to be exact Q311967 ) might be causing the problem. Since I can't get into XP, though, I can't uninstall it through Windows. Anyone have any idea on how to uninstall this from a prompt? Thanks for any help!

[glc]

Can you get it into safe mode?

[wh427]

No, I couldn't but, I was able to solve the problem of not being able to get into XP using another method. Thanks for the reply, though!

[glc]

Care to share your solution, please?

[TheMajor]

I would also be interested

[wh427]

Ok. Well, let me first explain my problem a little more in depth. I had a machine running XP Pro that was working fine. Last Sunday I booted it up, checked the weather, and shut it down. The next time I booted up it got to the Win XP Splash screen and hung there. I let it sit for 8 hours... no go. I tried to boot it into safe mode and it hung at mup.sys. Last know good configuration....hung. I tried to do a Recovery and it hung at examining the HDD. All of the partitions that I had are NTFS so, if I used a boot disk, I couldn't see them. I couldn't dun chkdsk, copy files.... nothing... I thought I was hosed.

Well, I have a second PC winning Win2k so I thought maybe I could hook up the "bad" HDD to it and get my data. The "bad" HDD is a SATA drive and my second PC is old and doesn't have any SATA ports. I headed out and bought a SATA to IDE converter ( http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...&sku=I136-1090 ), hooked it up to the Win2k machine, fired it up, and viola, there was my data. I copied what I needed and then ran a chkdsk /f on each partition. On my partition with XP it found two errors (don't remember exactly what they were) and fixed them. Well, I took the "bad" HDD out, re-connected it to it's normal machine and it booted up just fine. Now I'm in the process of trying to figure out what CAUSED the problem in the first place and seeing if I can keep it from happening again.

[glc]

Very creative!

You could have done the same thing by booting with the XP CD and using the console to run chkdsk. What you might want to do now is open a command prompt and run chkdsk /r - you may be developing bad sectors. If it finds more problems, time to run manufacturer's hard drive diags.

[wh427]

Thanks!

I tried getting into the recovery console but it wouldn't work. I would boot from the XP CD and press F6 (since it's a SATA drive). I'd load the SATA drivers and tell it I wanted to do a recovery (by pressing "R"). Then, it would begin to "examine" the HDD and it would hang there. It did the same thing if I tried to re-install XP too...

I ran Seagate's diagnostic tools and the drive came up clean... I will run the chkdsk with the /r flag tonight and wee what comes up. Something I've come across that might explain the problem, though I'm not sure I fully understand it... It appears that others have had this problem and it seems to happen most commonly with SATA HDD's with an 8MB buffer. I guess the SATA drives are too quick and they shut down windows before the HDD buffer can be cleared. Somehow that causes problems... I'm still seeing if I can get a better grip on understanding that, though...