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It works! It works! It works! It works! It works! It works! It works! It works! It works! It works! It works! It works! It works! It works! It works! It works! It works! It works! It works! It works!
...well, it will work, tomorrow, with you help!

My floppy disk drive came today, and there was a disk in it, so i formatted that and put the first windows setup disk on it and told it to boot from fdd. I left it for a few mins because there was no action out of it for a while but when I came back there was a set up screen asking me to insert disk 2 or something along those lines! Unfortunately, I will have to wait until tomorrow before I can buy some more.

How, and at what point, do I enter the 'recovery console,' and what do I do then?

I have also ordered the cd-drive for €150 but it seems its not essential now Oh well, a working cd drive is better than a broken one!

Hi Ger, good news! It's at the Windows XP Welcome screen, after the initial drivers are loaded, you have the option to press -R- to enter the recovery screen. It would actually be easier and a lot quicker loading up from CD (if you have a Windows XP Setup CD), you'll be glad you bought it in the long run.

Once you enter the recovery console, the first thing I need you to do is type in chkdsk /r ,and let it do it's job. Normally takes a few hours. Note any errors. When it's finished, reboot and see if you can get into Windows.

I got that far, then typed chdsk/r. but it said cmmand not recognised, so i typed help and it said i could type just chkdsk, so I did and that worked, and now it is asking me this:

Type the full path (including drive letter) of the location of AUTOCHK.EXE

Any advice?

EDIT: I'm just after typing in C:\WINDOWS\Sytem32 but it says it cant be found there. Is it on one of the floopies or do I have to put it on one, or is it somewhere else on C: ?

Hi Ger,

I've really not used this disks before (normally use the CD), it should be on one of them. Your right, it should be on c:\windows\system32 but we can't be certain that this is in-tact at the moment. you can move to the system32 directory by using the cd command. For example: cd system32 and it should take you to the system32 directory. Let me know if you really can't get past this point and I'll look for some spare floppies and download to see where it is.

Thanks mad,

I still cant find it. I also tried C:\WINDOWS\ServicePackFiles\i386 but no joy there either. I did a little looking around the net to see if I could find any info on it...and it turns out I'm not the only one to experience this problem. Some people are saying that they had hidden partitions (I have no idea what that is or means) and if I use ptedit.exe or something, that I will be able to unhide a partition and then it should be able to find AUTOCHK.EXE ...I really have no idea what I'm on about here though!


I also had a look through the other commands in the recovery console, and there are ones called FIXBOOT, Bootcfg and Fixmbr. Are they any help?

EDIT I just downloaded it from "Unmountable Boot Volume" Win XP and I put it on a floppy and its disk checking now I will let ye know how I get on...

It finished and it said CHKDSK fixed one or more errors on the volume. What now, reboot? Through floppy or normally? Is there anything else I need to do from the recovery console before I exit it?

Cool, time to see if you can boot to Windows. If you can't, let me know of any error messages and we shall continue from there.