Ok, my WinXP system got hosed big time and won't boot anymore. I'm running out of ideas on how to fix it other than reformat the drive. Here is what happened.

The other night I was uncompressing a large archive when everything slowed down to a crawl. After a while I got a blue screen so I rebooted thinking it was just some glitch. Unfortunately the system will not boot anymore. It will start booting and go the the WinXP screen with the animated bar and it will sit there for a long time (over a minute). There is disk activity going on during all that time. Eventually the WinXP screen will disappear and I will get a blank screen. After another long time the mouse pointer will come up on the blank screen and I'm able to move it around. After another long break I get this message "winlogon.exe - Unable to locate component. The application has failed because comdlg32.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem". After clicking on the OK button and waiting for another couple minutes (with some disk activity) I get another message "The Logon User Interface DLL msgina.dll failed to load. Contact your system administrator to replace the DLL, or restore the original DLL". At this point my only option is to restart.

So it looks like bunch of system files got hosed somehow. I was thinking that I could just boot from the WinXP CD and run the console and restore the files but I'm not able to this this either. I'm running ASUS P4C800-E deluxe mobo with two 250GB Maxtor drives in RAID-0 configuration connected to the FastTrack RAID controller on the mobo. So when I boot from the WinXP CD I need to press F6 and load the RAID drivers from a floppy. This works fine and eventually I'm presented with a screen where I can either try to setup WinXP (Enter) or start the Recovery Console (R) . When I select either of these options and the setup starts scanning through the available disks I get a blue screen. "A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer. Disable or uninstall any anti-virus, disk defrag or backup .... and run chksk /F ....
Technical info
STOP: 0x00000024
ntfs.sys (0x001902FE, 0xF7CD6B74, 0xF7CD6870, 0xF7439746

So at this point I'm not able to launch the recovery console or even reinstall WinXP on the system partition (there are two partitions on the RAID drive). If I don't load the RAID drivers during WinXP setup then I can start the recovery console, but then I can't see the RAID drives which contains the boot partition.

Any suggestion as to what I can do other than reformat the drives?

Hello and welcome to PCHF.

This is quite a bad error because NTFS relates to the partition on your hard drive.

• Have you tried booting into safemode or last know good configuration?

I have seen a fix for this on another site but it was related to Windows 2000, but lets try rework it for Windows XP.

Download the Windows XP bootdisks from here, NB you will need 4 blank diskettes: http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm


Now this is the part I am not sure of but lets try.

• Place the first setup disk into another computer and modify the file txtsetup.sif
• Insert a semicolon ( ; at the beginning of the line, as shown in the following example:
• [FileSystems.Load]
  fat = fastfat.sys
  ;ntfs = ntfs.sys
• Save changes to the file.
• Start the computer that is experiencing the "stop 0x24" error message by using the four Setup disks.
• When the Welcome to Setup dialog box is displayed, press F10 to start Recovery Console.
• Run the following command to repair the corrupted NTFS partition: chkdsk c: /p
• When finished type exit to quit Recovery Console, and then restart the computer.

If this doesn't work then I recommend that you remove the drive and place it in another computer (set it up as a slave). Then run chkdsk /f and chkdsk /p on it as well as a defrag.

Thanks for the suggestion. I've been trying several different things over the weekend and this is one of the suggestions that I found. However, those instructions don't seem to be applicable to WinXP SP2. First, WinXP has six bootdisk rather than four. Second, the first disk does not have txtsetup.sif. I found a file named txtsetup.si_ ,but it's in binary format so it's not possible to edit it manually with a text editor. Since I wasn't able to edit the bootdisk file, using the bootdisk resulted in ntfs.sys BSOD when trying to reinstall Windows.

With that in mind do you have another PC that you could stick your hard drive into?

Configure it as a slave, boot up and run
chkdsk d: /p
(D: being the hard drive letter)

You could also run chkdsk d: /f