Thursday, December 23, 2004

Laptops and Windows/XP

The broken machine came home. When it boots there are no users on the
menu. Last night was spent learning about Windows recovery. What a good
thing we have a similar laptop, and had the disks from that, as the
supplied disks did not arrive with the broken one. Daughter please follow
instructions, as I can't predict what is going to happen from 200 miles away!!
Anyway we went through CHKDSK, CHKDSK /P and /R. The latter took ages and
got to 73%, then moved onto 46% - bit scary that, still no errors reported,
so its good news. Then into the realms of Safe Mode - pretty useless really
- no Administrator ID appeared, so we're in the same position. Then into
window recovery console - OK if you have a disk problem, but we
don't. Then run setup properly, and get Windows re-installed. That
cracked it. All up and running - except for one file that can't be
accessed - no owner information. Fortunately its not important, and can be
deleted in safe mode, which it has been.
This is now the second time I've had this problem on different
systems. Definitely a good advert for backups -if ever one was needed.

Why and how does the owner attribute get set / deleted in XP/home?

Two whole evenings gone - just like that, and no idea of the cause
- nothing obvious in the event log, some strange errors on Dec 2, but
nothing more recent that doesn't happen all the time.

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