In trying to clone my 60 gb hard drive to a 500 gb hard drive, I ran some utilities on the 60 gb hard drive to fix bad sectors and find missing data. Apparently in the process, I damaged something in Windows. Right now the drive will not boot beyond the blue screen with the Windows XP logo in regular mode nor in safe mode. I’m documenting my steps here because the usual troubleshooting steps have failed and I need to make sure I’m not repeating the same steps twice.
- Ran chkdsk and the drive is fine.
- Confirm that the drive is set to master. Confirmed.
We interrupt this process to play croquet because the 4 year old could not have asked in a nicer way.
The grass is too high for croquet except where there is no grass and the hill is too steep there. The mosquitoes are too numerous. The air is too hot. Children back inside and I’m back to troubleshooting.
- Last Known Good Configuration. No luck. I feel a reinstallation of Windows in my future.
- Booting to the Ultimate Boot CD and cleaning up files on hard disk to create more space. Cleared prefetch, deleted all temporary files, removed some unnecessary directories. Increased free space on hard disk from 1.16 gb to 3.14 gb. Ran automatic tools for RegCleaner 4.3. Removing 2939 invalid registry entries some which have been hanging out since January 1, 2003. Here’s hoping that Clonezilla backup of the hard drive is valid.
- Registry cleaner choked. Re-running.
- Registry Cleaner choked again. Booting to Windows CD for repair.
- The repair prompts "The file ‘GAGP30KX.SYS’ on (Unknown) is needed." Looking for this on the SP2 disc. Looking like I’ve got some screwed up video drivers. VGA mode could have probably helped.
This worked. The machine is going again but somewhere in the process I think I messed some files up. Rather than spend any more time working on this, I am going to restore from the Clonezilla image and try again but I believe I’ll wait until my new hard drive comes in.
