I have a Dell 8400 with XP Home SP2 that took a quick brown-out today. Now when it tries to boot into Windows, it goes to blue screen with
STOP: 0x00000024 (0x00190203, 0x87393A38, 0xC0000102, 0x00000000).

I found a suggestion online that said to make 6 floppy disks to get to the recovery console but on the 4th disk loading, I received an error "atapi.sys is corrupted".

Does that mean the atapi.sys on the 8400 is corrupt? How can I replace it with a good version of the file? I tried to boot up with a floppy disk and copy the file from A: to C: but I get "invalid drive specification".

I need some help urgently.

Thanks,
Tim

Hey Reilly,

You won't be able to access your C: drive that way. Your file system for drive C: is most likely NTFS, which cannot be accessed via the DOS prompt. The only way to repair this problem is to use a Windows XP Setup CD. You can boot directly from the CD, and press -R- when prompted to enter to recovery console. Are you able to do this?

No, when used the XP CD, it was loading Recovery Console files and got to a point where "Setup cannot continue". The XP Recovery Console software could not "see" the hard disk.

Hopefully that just means that the PC was made during the time where SATA was still in it's infancy, and we required drivers on floppy disk.

If so, then this should be the download for it: Drivers and Downloads

When you run it, it will ask you for a blank floppy to write it's drivers to.

Then, when you next come to install Windows, during the start of Windows setup, it will ask you to press F6 to load any third party drivers. Press F6 and insert the floppy disk, and the drivers will then be loaded.

That's exactly what happened. Had friend come over who knew that exactly. Found the driver needed at the Dell site. With that driver, we could get XP to see the hard drive. Ran CHKDSK /R and this repaired the disk. Thanks for the help. Now back to work on the codecs.

Great stufff Reilly, marked as Resolved.