Brussells Development Blog

I was diggin through some of my draft posts and found this nice tip I forgot to finish and post up, so here it is!

For anyone having the problem as stated in the title of this post upon booting into Windows or even from the Windows Installation CD to repair, reformat, etc. I have the fix all solution for you. I recently had a friend bring me their computer to fix, I thought to myself, eh worse case I just boot up with Windows XP CD and drop partitions, format and reinstall Windows. After updating all the patches worse case will take me a night or 2. Well, not so easy. Every boot of Windows, safe mode, normal mode, console caused a blue screen of death “BSOD” with the information of ntfs.sys 0×00000024. I thought, well geuss that file is corrupted so let’s just start a fresh. To my suprise even booting with the XP Installation CD caused the same BSOD with the same error. Now I’m intrigued at this point, so I use my old friend Google and find random postings about the same problems. Seems if you don’t have a floppy drive, which none of my computers have now, your sorta SOL. 

I luckily put together other random problem solutions can came up with a game plan. I pulled a new trick by downloading a Linux OS that runs straight from a CD-ROM that you can boot with and used some handy Linux commands to get the hard drive readable again. I shall now go over the process below: 

• First, grab you a copy of Knoppix Linux (at the time of this writing I used v5.1.1-CD-2007-01-04). This should be an ISO from one of the many generous mirror download sites on the main Knoppix site. Burn the Knoppix ISO file to a CD. Now you have a bootable Linux OS right on a CD! Boy I love Linux ;p
• Now, pop that CD in your drive and boot up with it. NOTE: Make sure you have the CD\DVD boot sequence in your BIOS set ahead of your Hard Drives. You will now be presenting with a screen saying something like hit a key, or hit return to boot with Knoppix. Go ahead this is what we want to do. Be prepared for a little wait as all the linux libraries and kernals load all your hardware and OS for you, remember it’s coming from the CD to your memory so it will be slower than a normal Windows boot session. Hopefully you should now be sitting in a nice Knoppix OS gui, sorta Windows like for those not familiar with Linux GUIs. BTW, welcome to Linux ;p.
• You should see a icon at the bottom taskbar that looks sorta like a MS-Dos command prompt icon, called Knoppix Console or something. Thats where we want to go, click it and you should be in a familiar DOS type console. Type in the command prompt the following: su  - This is the super-user command to get better access to the system, much like the admin accounts on Windows. 
• Now, type in the following command: cfdisk Use this utility to identify your hard drive mount. Normally, hard drives are named hda1, hda2, hda3, etc. My case was a little different due to hardware differences, mine was labeled sda1, sda2, sda3, etc. You want to find the one that contains your hard drive contents, it also might be easy to use one of the guis outside the command prompt such as Knoppixs File Explorer. 
• Once you have identified the mount “hda or sda” + 1, 2, 3, … you ready for the final command so exit the cfdisk utility if your still in it and type this in the command prompt: ntfsfix /dev/[mount] Replace [mount] with your hda1, hda2, or sda1, sda2 hard drive label. So for instance, mine was found in sda2, so I typed in: ntfsfix /dev/sda2
• You should now see a spit out of text but it should end up with a successful message, if not then look up how to unmount the disk mount from Google and then try the ntfsfix command again. You are now ready to boot back up with the Windows Installation CD!
• Close Knoppix down by doing the Log Out -> Restart commands from inside the gui. It should take it a few minutes again to shut everything down but end with a msg of remove the cd from the tray and hit [Return] to reboot the computer. 
• Place the Windows Installation cd back into the drive and hit [Return].  Now, once your back inside the Windows Installation CD choose “R” for repair a Windows Installation, and choose the one on your system currently. Get to the recovery console and run the command:  chkdsk /r  This will take a while so go eat, drink, be merry while all this goes on. 

After chkdsk has ran and finished, you should be fixed and back to a bootable Windows OS. I hope you take the time to back everything up now and then reinstall Windows b\c the problem is still probably laying around ready to do it’s damage again. Hope this tip finds it’s way to someone who is in desperate need of a fix for this problem. Sorry for the terrible formatting, it was really late when I was completing this fix on the PC and writing this tutorial in the down time.