Win 98 Recovery Disc on XP Machine

Drag00n79

Got a call from a friend this morning. Said his screen says "Unmountable Boot Volume" and he can't do anything with his PC. So, I googled it and gave him the info I found, which involved getting the system to reboot into windows via his XP CD. He phoned back later and said it didn't work. He didn't have the XP disc but someone else gave him a Win 98 Recovery Disc and told him that would also work. Can you boot an XP from a 98 disc?

galactus

No, 98 and XP are completely different.

Booting from the XP CD is the way forward.

Drag00n79

Thanks for the quick reply. I have downloaded Win XP boot disc for him — needs six floppies!

galactus

bedlam wrote:

The win98 disk contains fdsk which will allow you to mess around with the partitions such as set the correct partition as active and possibly getting it booting that way.

Nooo!! Mesing around with partitions is NOT the way forward. Beg, borrow...or...umm...just get an XP CD.

RicardoSmith

bedlam wrote:

The win98 disk contains fdsk which will allow you to mess around with the partitions such as set the correct partition as active and possibly getting it booting that way.

Unless it NTFS which 98 can't see.

RicardoSmith

bedlam wrote:

it worked fine with an ntfs formatted win2k install. Although it was just a basic setting of the active partition.

Would have though it would have screwed with it. Obviously not.

galactus

RicardoSmith wrote:

Unless it NTFS which 98 can't see.

IIRC, FDISK identifies a NTFS partition as "non-DOS".

Drag00n79

Currently trying to fix it for him. I got the 6 XP start up disks sorted. I loaded them (eventually!), typed R at the welcome to setup screen. After getting the DOS prompt I typed "chkdsk /p". The problem is it is now looking for the location of "autochk.exe". It says it can't find it at "C:\Windows\system32". I suppose I can download it onto another floppy and type in "a:\autochk.exe" as the location?

fletch

Shamrok wrote:

Currently trying to fix it for him. I got the 6 XP start up disks sorted. I loaded them (eventually!), typed R at the welcome to setup screen. After getting the DOS prompt I typed "chkdsk /p". The problem is it is now looking for the location of "autochk.exe". It says it can't find it at "C:\Windows\system32". I suppose I can download it onto another floppy and type in "a:\autochk.exe" as the location?

Ur still gonna need the XP disc if I'm not mistaken. All those 6 discs do is load up Windows XP setup if your computer doesn't have CD-ROM support at startup, (could be wrong though)

Drag00n79

No, the six discs worked fine and it found the autochk.exe file on the floppy. All working fine again. Thanks everyone!