midtoad's blog

Fixing Windows with Linux

Recently my wife's notebook crashed (flaky power supply?), and would not start again. Nothing would get it going, not even the Windows XP CD. Finally I tried booting the notebook via a Knoppix linux CD... and had it running soon after!

After my wife's notebook rebooted (she moved it while working on it, and there must be a cold-solder joint somewhere on the motherboard that breaks a circuit when it flexes slightly), she got the worrisome "Windows did not shut down cleanly" screen, and Safe Mode would not restart the PC, nor would "Last known good configuration".

Each time, the loading failed at alim1541.sys, which made me suspect that was the problem, but I soon learned otherwise. I tried booting from the Windows XP CD, and getting into the Repair facility, but as soon as I chose R for repair, there was a blue screen of death (BSoD), and a message about "stop: 0x00000024 (ntfs.sys).

I next tried to install Windows from the CD, with the same result. Hmm.

So I got out a Bart PE CD (a bootable CD you make from your own PC's installation of Windows), and it also failed with an ntfs.sys error.

What this error means is that there is corruption in the driver that is responsible for reading to/from the NTFS file system. There are numerous mentions of it on the Microsoft website, but they all suggest you run chkdsk on the affected drive. You morons! How can you run chkdsk when you can't boot the PC?

Finally I tried booting the notebook off several different Linux live CDs: Mandriva, Ubuntu, and Knoppix. My idea was to copy over good copies of ntfs.sys and alim1541.sys. But I was thwarted each time because I was unable to mount the hard drive in read-write mode. However, I was able to mount the drive in read-only mode, and quickly copied off onto a USB drive copies of all of the important documents on the drive. Whew!

After several hours of this thrashing about I returned to Googling ntfs.sys errors, and suddenly came up with some great advice out of Germany! Apparently the Knoppix CD has a utility on it called ntfsfix, which is designed for precisely the problem I was having. At first it wouldn't work, so I re-ran cfdisk and re-wrote the partition table to disk. After that, ntfsfix ran without errors. I then rebooted the notebook, and Windows XP started up! (It complained about disk integrity and insisted on running chkdsk, but I was okay with that).

So, once again, I've had to resort to Linux to fix Windows. Maybe Microsoft should include a copy of Linux with each copy of Windows it sells?