test machine no longer boots into windos xp

[aay]

I'd still like to know the conditions under which this problem arises. Clearly it doesn't happen on alll XP/NT/W2K machines. I showed someone Knoppix the other day on an XP machine and it had no problem. Maybe this is hardware related. I seem to remember Dell's being particularly susceptible to this problem. Anyone know the answer to this?

I'm really like Dave Bechtel. I really don't use Windows anymore so I don't know myself. I only use a version of Win 98 that I run from Win4Lin.

Thanks

[fyfong]

Funny thing you mentioned Dell. I ran into this problem with my old Dell Dimension P2 desktop. But then my work Dell Latitude CPx P3 laptop is fine. Though I probably not going to run Knoppix on the laptop again. At least not until someone can tell what the cause of this problem.

I think Knoppix is great and all. Just hope someone can figure this one out soon.

[yazdzik]

Dear Friends,

There are specific bios wherein one can allow boot from a drive, or not, as well as arrange the order of the drives.
One has to be careful, as Dell allows both, thus, not only must the drive order be correct in the boot order, but the drive checked as well.

There are some bios that if the drive from which the boot is selected, I remember deskpro was like this, that it will not boot at all, thus if one has CDROM first, and nothing is in there, one has to find a bootable cdrom. One can always check in the bios, after shutting down knoppix, to make sure that the hard drive is both checked amd first. Of course, this means that after every change from a cd OS to the hard drive one, there is the extra step.

XP cds have a repair console, which works well, but, there is no reason to beleive that if one went to the bios first, the order could be reverted to hd first. One should try this before repair, i e, reboot, use whatever the boot function keyis, set to boot from hd, and see if the "complete" OS boots, without errors, as XP eats a lot of RAM, and, if the ram is not free at boot up, there is usually something missing.

One ought, then, after booting from hd, boot into safe mode to check all drivers are correct, although there is no reason for the driver to come unbound by running aother OS from a cd, unless the cd is not correctly cabled.

Finally, if repair is necessary, one ought ot note what happened, as it may be that the kid decided to enable write functions to an ntfs drive?
Most important is to make sure that the OS disk for Windows is a real OS disk and not a "restore disk," as I have seen them inappropriately labled, and, obviously, the restore disk is a mirror of the new hd, which would wipe the drive. Repair is not the same as restore, but a few companies, including compaq, have yet to figure this out. Thus, only the repair option on a real XP OS cd is of any help to you.

Any problems, please write back, with the model of pc, bios version,

Best wishes,
Yazdzik

[aay]

So the solution is to reverse any changes made to the bios boot order after finishing with knoppix? Sounds almost too easy, but it's certainly worth trying/remembering.

[yazdzik]

Dear Friends,
I have been trying since reading the post to replicate the problem, and have yet to be able so to do. Since nothing is written to the hard drive(hda1) there is no relationship between the knoppix problem and a change in the hd. However, if Windows does not shut down correctly, there is a question of paging file issues. Paging is part of the OS, and dumps stuff out of the physical memory into the page file, which you can see on the root of "c", by the way. Now, if some critical setting were left in the physical memory, and windows did not save some setting, then Knoppix were to use the physical memory as its swap, as it indeed does, there is a remote, and a very remote possibility that something necessary to windows remembering settings might be changed, although this would involve a terrible malfunction, or careless shutting down. The question is, when windows is not propertly shut down, were does the restore seat. If in the physical memory, then Knoppix would, of course, disturb the windows settings. Still, such a thing would not normally create anything other than a forgotten margin or language setting. Thus, it sounds a lot like a plain old windows problem.

Now, can someone please tell me why me knoppix does not have flash in the browers? That is a problem.

Best,
Martin

[zipslack]

Ran into this problem with a Dell GX260....unplug the power cable for a few seconds and then plug it back in and boot. Try this BEFORE using the rescue disk and possibly re-formatting your machine.

[aay]

unplug the power cable for a few seconds and then plug it back in and boot.

This worked? I wonder why.

[Dave_Bechtel]

--My suspicion is that the machine has a buggy BIOS.

unplug the power cable for a few seconds and then plug it back in and boot.

This worked? I wonder why.

[Nick]

I have used Knoppix on a varity of M$ OS (NT, 2K) and a varity of machines (DELL included) with no problems.

Now, I wonder with XP if it could be to do with this hardware inventory thing that they built in. Could it (would it??) also take readings from the state of BIOS at initial install, and then after it being changed to use Knoppix somehow confuses it on boot as to something has changed but it doesn't know what?

Just a guess, but a very Microsoftian sort of problem one comes to expect once the solution/cause is found.

Nick

[Bluethunder]

Ever since I ran Knoppix, my XP runs really slow...I'm talking extremely slow. It's chunky, and when I try to listen to MP3's in XP, they are chunky as well. I would be using knoppix, except it doesn't support my sound/modem...