Corrupt Drivers = No Boot?

[coldfront212]

Hey all,

This is kinda complicated, so i'll give the short story and then the long one. The short version is I installed the new drivers from creative for my SB Audigy ZS. After doing that, when my computer boots (into windows) it gets all the way to where it switches from the "loading windows" to where it would ask for my logon, and then the system restarts. So, i break out my trusty windows setup disk, and try to enter recovery to get rid of the bad drivers. When i try to access the windows installation the recovery console crashes with a Bad_Pool_Caller error. The stop codes are: 0x000000c2, 0x00000043, 0xc43d1000, 0x00000000, 0x00000000. I did some online research and confirmed that it was my bad drivers. So then i resigned myself to reinstalling windows, but when the setup wizard tries to access the disk, the computer crashes.

Ok, thats the problem in a nutshell. I have my computer setup to dual boot into Windows XP Home SP2, and into Linux Fedora Core 5. I am currently on my computer in Linux. Linux works with no problems and allows me to use my computer for research into this problem, so that is nice. I have 2 HDs one in FAT (for linux) and one in NTFS (for xp). For a while i thought the ntfs drive was bad, but i hooked it up to a friends comp and was able to access the drive without difficulty. I tried to manually remove the drivers, but i think to finish the job i would need msconfig and regedit which can only be run from within the busted copy of windows (i think). I tried to load the ntfs kernel for linux so i could listen to my music and watch my movies, but it doesnt see the drive, although that could be due to my ignorance of linux.

Since whenever i try to access the drive it fails, I think the only way to resolve this is to get another HD and install windows on it and use my old ntfs drive as storage. Unfortunately i am a college student, so if i can cheat and not spend money i would love to.

If anyone has any ideas, I would love to hear them. Thanks for reading all this, i know it wasnt very well organized...

-coldfront

[macko72]

Did you tried repair install: http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

http://support.microsoft.com/default...;en-us;Q314492
Read this article it may help you thru your problem!

[coldfront212]

Well, the problem continued to get worse (the windows boot cd would say inspecting hardware config and then reset) and i broke down and got a new HD. It was an amazing excuse to buy anothe 250 GB HD. The old hd is fine so i now have 3/4 of a tb which makes me very happy.

I am going to go with the onboard sound for the moment. I will out my SB back in eventually but I have had a fair bit of problems with sound related issues, so maybe i would be better off with integrated.

Thanks for your help. The only thing i can come up with is that there is/are a few corrupt sectors somewhere on the drive and whenever the setup exe hit that, the install crashed. It gave me a week of experience dealing in Linux, and that never hurt.

On a side note, i had my documents only accessible through my account for security reasons, is there any way to recover that data from another install of windows?

Thanks.

-coldfront

[glc]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308421

When you get your files off, you should run diagnostics on the hard drive - if there are any bad sectors I'd be wary of using it for anything important. At the very least reformat it, full format, not quick.