i have a couple of problems that Dell couldn't solve on the phone, so they gave me instructions on how to do a repair to XP. the last person said that this repair would solve 99% of the problems. It didn't. I just want to be certain that I did the right thing to restore the system. i booted from the cd, selected "R" for repair, got to a c:\windows prompt, typed CHKDSK /R, then waited for a couple of hours.
That didn't appear to do anything so i am wondering if there is something else to the repair, or if I have to reinstall the whole thing and lose all programs?
1- svchost.exe memory error and General Services Processor has to close on each restart (i have tried several fixes for this, nothing works. both this and the next problem occur in safe mode as well
2- no sound mixer unavailable so no sound. if i reinstall the driver, it disappears again with a) restart, or b) by opening the sounds control panel
3- (maybe unrelated because this one has been happening since day one) inserting a CD (blank or not) crashes the system more than half the time. some of the rest of the time, it just refuses to read it.
Chkdsk /R isn't going to repair XP. All it's going to do is look for and fix errors on the hard drive, and that could take a while.
Have you scanned for malware lately with Ad-aware, Spybot, etc?
If you want to do a Repair/Reinstall of XP, boot from the XP CD but don't press R at the first screen, press Enter. The XP User License (EULA) should appear. Accept the license and at the next screen press R for Repair/Reinstall. Your personal files and software shouldn't be affected, but the first thing you have to do after the Repair/Reinstall is install all XP updates and fixes again.
thanks. if this is the case, i got bad advice from dell. i even asked him twice if what i was doing was going to repair xp, and he said yes. i could vaguely remember dos days when chkdsk just checked errors, but took his word for it after two times.
i will try it.
thanks again. it worked and in less than an hour (chkdsk took 2+)
the dell chat provided correct instructions on this, but a bit ambiguous. the phone conversation was wrong.
charlie
mombodog
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Posted January 15th, 2007 20:00