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"I appear to have buggered up Windows."

Now, this isn't a problem, but I would appreciate the use of the address book because it has my Dad's email in there.

Here's what happens:

I boot up, it loads normally. Scandisk comes up (naturally), but at the end it says it can't write to C:syslog.txt, possibly due to lack of space. However, I know I have 308mb left. Then, it continues and asks me to log on. I have never logged on before, so I just press "enter" or "cancel", and it continues as before. At this point it went through the new hardware thing once. Then, it just freezes. When i do ctrl+alt+delete, I have Rnaapp running and Msgrs32 (I think) which is "not responding". Then I have to turn it off at the plug, and the process repeats.

Possible causes:

Well, I ran it with VMware a few times, so this is my prime suspect at the moment. Something else could be that I ran a chmod on the whole drive. The weird thing is, it took ages and worked, even though Fat32 filesystems blatently don't support these permissions. Now, I think my kernel is storing these permissions but still, it could have corrupted it or something. Note I can still read the drive from Linux.

So, if anyone has any ideas, let me know. Getting Windows up isn't a priority, but getting my Dad's address is, so alternatively if anyone knows how I can extract this from the Address Book that'd be great. Cheers.

At this moment I am building a Computer with Windows XP.
And never in my time have I had problems of the nature that Im having now.
I ended up Formatting the whole thing over again, reinstalling drivers after the Hard Drive froze completely!
It then requred a A: Prompt for start up, even asking for a Boot Registry.
Arggh, it can all be a pain in the back side if you ask me........

*shudders*

Uh.. you're going to be sleeping in my room Friday and Saturday night. The rest of that concept is just too scary to type.

Heh, cheers.

Turbonutter wrote:
> "Of course not you stupid t**t, it's like kicking a lion
> in the nads and going to sleep in his pen"

ROFL - Nice one, oh, I like those dodgy pics that you dared to display to all the world...

Well... "no"

Or more accurately:

"Of course not you stupid t**t, it's like kicking a lion in the nads and going to sleep in his pen"

:D

You.. you.. you don't trust me when I'm utterly p****d?

I'm hurt...

Heh, I just didn't want a slighty mashed luke deleting my kernel32.dll one night, so I ran the CHMOD to see what happens. Amazingly, it really does work, it's acting like any other ext2/3.

I'll have a go at safe mode later, cheers.

I think the address book is stored in

C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Microsoft\Address Book

as xxxx.wab, where xxxx is (I think) the id of this PC.

If I right click that file in Explorer, it opens up Address Book showing me the contents of that file. I suppose if you were to send one of us that .wab file, Turbo, we'd be able to get the address you need (assuming you'd trust us with the others!).

If you just open up the .wab file, it has a load of tosh in there, but you can just about make out the names and addresses - despite the open square characters that appear to be used as separators throughout.

Turbonutter wrote:
> Something else could be that I ran a chmod on the whole
> drive. The weird thing is, it took ages and worked, even
> though Fat32 filesystems blatently don't support these
> permissions.

Don't know how you did that!!!! But that would be my prime suspect. Why did you chmod the wole drive?? Did you mistake the DOS prompt for a UNIX one??

> So, if anyone has any ideas, let me know.

Do you have access to another machine that is working, if so, could you plug the knackerd HD in as a slave drive and just try to access the contents of that without using it to boot windows? You might be able to save the files you need and repair the HD (somehow undo the chmod!!)?