Question:
I'm trying to help out a friend whose computer "crashed" at a power
shut down. As a result the PC would no more boot normally (hanging
with a blue screen for corrupt registry and some DLL required at very
early boot phase).
The PC is equipped with
1) a small partition (3GB I believe) which contains installation CD
images and a software called Acronis True Image (if I remember right)
2) the big partition (150GB or so) with Windows XP+SP2 in French (this
detail matters)
When trying to recover the PC, Acronis would only seem to offer to
reinstall a NEW BLANK WinXP FR installation -- which would mean
loosing all personal data.
Answer:
So I decided I would use the available WinXP BOOT CD (available only
in UK version) and boot from it and try a REPAIR installation, that
would supposedly not destroy any personal data, then copy all the
personal data to CDs then do the full reinstall again (from the
Acronis partition if I may name it so) and re-load the saved data. I
thought it was the clever way to approach it.
I booted from the CD andinstructed WinXP to only "recover" the
existing installation, which apparently worked fine: I could access
the large physical drive and back-up all personal data to CDs. So far
so good.
I then needed to reinstall WinXP from the Acronis partition for two
reasons:
1) the now installed XP was in english (my friend is french speaking
only)
2) and the installed environmental software were no more working
(sound sw, video sw, printers, etc etc)
However each time I trie to reboot there seemed to be NO WAY anymore
to provoke the boot via the Acronis partition/boot selector menu. It
would appear (but my understanding might be wrong) that the WinXP
reinstall "decided" to redirect the boot process straight to the big
WinXP disk, no more allowing me access to the other partition.
I *guess* that I would need some trick or utility to "reset/restore"
the boot process to go to the Acronis parition first (I hope it wasn't
corrupted by the WinXP UK reinstall !!) and *hopefully* use it to
reinstall a full clean Xp FR installation + all environmental
software ? Is that presumably going to work as I hope ?
Does such a utility exist ?
Do I need to do further data gathering/analysis before proceeding ?
How can I check the Acronis partition is still valid ?
Would a dump of the boot.ini file or any other file be useful ?
I suggest you post to the Acronis forum. Frankly I'm surprised you were
able to succeed has you have using an English version to repair a French
install. If you had used a French version things might be different.
As long as you didn't format the disk/volume/partition that teh Acronis archive is
located on, that should still be ok. Since you used a disk other than the OEM disk
that came with the machine, you most likely lost the pointers to the archive or
they're still there only in a different language.
How were you getting to the archive before, by pressing one of the F# keys during
boot? Acronis Recovery Startup Manager uses F11 to run it.
Did you check the manufacturers site for a possible solution on getting at the
archive when a system is unbootable?
