[Lyleus]

Hi all,

I have a Asus P5A motherboard.

I've looked at similar situation on this board, but I think mine is a little different because I can pinpoint when and why it happened.

Last week my desktop computer started to crash every time it loaded windows and then my IDE HD died as well. So I bought a new SATA HDD and installed windows xp fine on it. After the installation, and when windows loaded for the first time, I noticed that it did not recognize my onboard LAN or audio, my video card, soundcard and other hardware. It had the "!" mark in the device manager beside all of them. The only thing that worked was my USB drives and it recognizes my RAM slots. This may have been because I used the wrong XP disc (it was a backup CD for another computer of mine).

So I downloaded my chipset motherboard drivers from a different PC and installed it. They must've been the wrong drivers because when rebooted my machine, just before it would go to load windows, all that I see is a flashing cursor at the top left.

I formatted my new HD again and tried to reinstall windows (this time with the correct windows XP CD), only to get the same thing when it reboots to go to the next stage of the windows set up: a flashing cursor.

Is my motherboard dead? Should I flash it? Any ideas?

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Any ideas? I'm kinda desperate here

[Lyleus]

Any ideas? I'm kinda desperate here

[rshaffer61]

Put your winxp cd in cd drive and reboot your system
When prompted to push any key to boot to cdrom then click a key
Click R to enter recovery console

Type the following

expand d:\i386\userinit.ex_ c:\windows\system32
click enter

Once it says 1 file copied
Then type exit and click enter
System will reboot
Make sure to remove winxp cd before it boots up and let it boot fully
Windows should start normally

If not post with result 

[Lyleus]

Hi, Thanks for your reply!

I did all of the above, and when it asked me to overwrite "userinit.exe" I said yes and pressed enter.

I typed "exit" at the console and it rebooted, and I got the same flashing cursor... so it didn't work:(

[rshaffer61]

If you have Windows CD...

1. Insert your Windows XP CD into your CD and assure that your CD-ROM drive is capable of booting the CD.
2. Once you have booted from CD, do NOT select the option that states: Press F2 to initiate the Automated System Recovery (ASR) tool.
You’re going to proceed until you see the following screen, at which point you will press the “R” key to enter the recovery console:



3. After you have selected the appropriate option from step two, you will be prompted to select a valid Windows installation (typically number “1").
Select the installation number, and hit Enter.
If there is an administrator password for the administrator account, enter it and hit Enter (if asked for the password, and you don't know it, you're out of luck).
You will be greeted with this screen, which indicates a recovery console at the ready:



4. There are eight commands you must enter in sequence to repair any of the issues I noted in the opening of this guide.
I will introduce them here, and then show the results graphically in the next six steps.
NOTE. Make sure, you press Enter after each command. Make sure, all commands are exact, including "spaces".
These commands are as follows:

CD..
ATTRIB -H C:\boot.ini
ATTRIB -S C:\boot.ini
ATTRIB -R C:\boot.ini
del boot.ini
BOOTCFG /Rebuild

Note about the above command.
BOOTCFG /REBUILD command which searches for pre-existing installations of Windows XP and rebuilds sundry essential components of the Windows operating system, recompiles the BOOT.INI file and corrects a litany of common Windows errors.
It is very important that you do one or both of the following two things:
A.) Every Windows XP owner must use /FASTDETECT as OS Load Option when the rebuild process is finalizing.
B.) If you are the owner of a CPU featuring Intel’s XD or AMD’s NX buffer overflow protection, you must also use /NOEXECUTE=OPTIN as an OS Load Option.
For the Enter Load Identifier portion of this command, you should enter the name of the operating system you have installed.
If, for example, you are using Windows XP Home, you could type Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition for the identifier (it's not crucial, however what the name is, as long, as it's meaningful).
Here is your computer screen:



5. Following command verifies the integrity of the hard drive containing the Windows XP installation. While this step is not an essential function in our process, it’s still good to be sure that the drive is physically capable of running windows, in that it contains no bad sectors or other corruptions that might be the culprit:

CHKDSK /R

6. This last command writes a new boot sector to the hard drive and cleans up all the loose ends we created by rebuilding the BOOT.INI file and the system files. When the Windows Recovery Console asks you if you are Sure you want to write a new bootsector to the partition C: ? just hit “Y”, then Enter to confirm your decision:

FIXBOOT

7. It’s time to reboot your PC by typing
EXIT
and pressing Enter.

With any luck, your PC will boot successfully into Windows XP as if your various DLL, Hive, EXE and NTLDR errors never existed.



2. If you don't have Windows CD...
Download Windows Recovery Console: http://www.thecomput...om/files/rc.iso
Download, and install free Imgburn: http://www.imgburn.c...hp?act=download
Using Imgburn, burn rc.iso to a CD.
Boot to the CD...let it finish loading.
When the "Welcome to Setup" screen appears, press R to start the Recovery Console.
Then, follow instructions from Step #3 above.

Thanks To Broni For The Instructions

[Lyleus]

Hi, thanks for the instructions!

I got to the first command line and it says that boot.ini didn't exist. So, I typed DIR and there was nothing in C:\.

[rshaffer61]

This part?

CD..
ATTRIB -H C:\boot.ini
ATTRIB -S C:\boot.ini
ATTRIB -R C:\boot.ini
del boot.ini
BOOTCFG /Rebuild

[Lyleus]

That's correct. After the first command line, it could not find boot.ini.

[rshaffer61]

Ok there seems to be a deeper problem then what was originally thought.
Let me ask is there data that needs to be saved?
We are going to attempt to do a Repair Installation and see if that repairs your windows. If not then we will have to do a Parallel Installation. Neither should cause any loss of data but I need to make sure before we continue if you need important data to be safe for sure.

[Lyleus]

All data is backed up so no worriers there!

All set!

[Lyleus]

Oh I already tried a parallel installation and it didn't work.

[rshaffer61]

OK is this the instructions you followed for the Parallel installation?

Parallel Installation of Windows XP

Boot to the Windows XP installation cd by pressing a key when the "Press any key to boot from cd" prompt appears at the top of the screen.

• At the "Welcome to Setup" screen, press Enter to set up Windows XP.
• Accept the License Agreement by pressing F8
• With your current installation selected in the box, press Esc
• Select C: Partition1 [NTFS] in the box and press Enter
• To continue setup using this partition, press C
• Now you should see formatting options...choose the last one, Leave the current file system intact (no changes), and press Enter
• To use a different folder, press Esc
• Name the folder WINDOWS0 (just type a 0 (zero)) and press Enter

The Windows installation should begin. This will install Windows to a new folder, leaving your data intact. Any programs installed on the old directory will have to be reinstalled to the new one. Device drivers will also have to be installed for all the hardware to work as it should.

The data will be located in the Documents and Settings folder (C:\Documents and Settings) under your old user account name...so when you set up the new installation, give yourself a slightly different user account name.

[Lyleus]

oh im sorry, I meant I already tried the repair install. I'll try this now! Thanks

[rshaffer61]

OK let me know how it works.

[Lyleus]

Something came up last night and I didn't have time to try it. I'll be doing it right after work today and i'll post results here. Thanks so much!