Ultimate Boot CD

Hi,

It' the first time I use UBCD and I'm having some problems.
My XP system won't boot anymore. The msgina.dll file is missing in the system32 dir and I don't want to do a re-install.
So I have the file on a floppy and trying to copy it in the system32 dir but with the file managers on UBCD I can't access my c: drive.
How can I do this? Which tool should I use?

Thanks,

Bert

More likely than not you have bad sectors and should use the Windows Recovery Console (accessed by booting off your Windows CD) and typing in
chkdsk /r
to run Checkdisk with bad sector scan.

If that completes but you still are having the issue try booting NTFS4DOS Free Edition (Filesystem Tools 2/2) and copy the file from the floppy that way. Normally Windows files on the CD are compressed (usually the last letter of the extension is _) so make sure you have it properly extracted beforehand. I forget if a specific tool is needed to extract the file or if it is a standard compression format.

I'm having a similar issue -- my W2K system is moderately hosed. I've checked for bad sectors, and now I need to copy ntldr and ntdetect.com over. However, when I go into NTFS4DOS from the UBCD menu, I can't access any drives EXCEPT my NTFS drives! So, I can write perfectly to the drives, but I can't actually go anywhere to get files.

Any suggestions on how to fix this? I'm writing this on my laptop, which lacks a floppy drive, so I can't make a bootable floppy, and the machine in question has no ether, just wifi.

After booting FreeDOS, type "NTFSDOS" at the command prompt. What do you see? Did you see any of your NTFS partitions getting mounted?

Hi Victor...

Yes, I see all my NTFS drives being mounted, and I can read them OK. The problem is, I need to write TO them -- ntfsdos (at least the version that came with the CD) is read-only. ntfs4dos should let me write, but when I boot to that, I can't get to my CDROM or floppy drives. So, I can either get access to my CD/floppy drives and READ from my NTFS drives, or I can WRITE to my NTFS drives and have no access to the places I need to copy files from.

Any idea how I can get to my floppy/CDROM drives from the bundled NTFS4DOS environment, or on an alternative way to mount my NTFS drives in a writable fashion?

Thanks,
-Tom

Unfortunately, the freeware version of NTFSDOS included in FreeDOS is read-only. So unless you are willing to pay for NTFSDOS Pro...

If you have the full version of UBCD, you could run INSERT and follow the instructions to mount NTFS partitions. But last I tried, it didn't work for me. The maintainer said he will supply a patch, but he has since stopped working on INSERT/UBCD due to change of circumstances.

Another alternative. If you have a spare HDD available, you could plug it in, format it with FreeDOS and copy the files out to it.

UBCD4Win would also be a good one for this example. UBCD is great for diagnostics and password resets and such. UBCD4Win is great for the tasks that you just can't do without launching XP such as copying files from one place to another without having an external drive available.

Thanks for the help guys. I got myself set up with UBCD for Windows, and found out that the drive actually IS failing (it had seemed stable, but it's degrading quickly now). My only option at this point is new hardware and trying to recover what I can from the disk.

BTW, Victor, it looks like NTFS4DOS (not NTFSDOS) allows writing to NTFS drives, but the default configuration in UBCD doesn't allow you access to any other drives.

Just an idea.... One of my boot images is Win'98 bootable and the CONFIG.SYS loads USB HDD drivers and CD-ROM drivers. Once at the command prompt, I just load the NTFS4DOS and have FULL access to all my drives.