Aborting windows xp install?

Quitting the installation at this stage will quite possibly leave you with more problems than when you started. It sounds like time for a clean installation (not an upgrade).

There is usually no turning back once you start overwriting an OS, but to get out of the setup routine (and use a possibly non-functional OS) you'd have to manually edit boot files such as boot.ini

Thanks Monger, I finally ended up doing a clean install. I had to put his hard drive in my pc and back up his files and format his drive. Put it back in his case, did the install, moved his drive back to my pc, copied his files back to his drive and then put it back in his case. A lot of extra work, but everything is running smooth for the moment. If you could just make people understand not to go "click happy" when they're on the net!

Spring

Partial installation abortions are illegal in america.

he he he, lol!

Spring

I have looked at the Boot.ini file and it does not indicate that a setup is taking place. In my case, I have a damaged Windows XP SP2 O.S. and attempted to repair using the Windows XP-SP1 CD. I want to abort that setup now (33 minutes remaining - waiting for the Key which I don't want to give it or it'll finish). But every time that the machine reboots, it restarts the setup a little before where I left off.

I looked at the Boot.ini file (using a Norton Systemworks 2005 Recover CD). That .ini file is still pointing to my Windows XP installation on the C: drive. So where is the pull coming from to restart the XP Installation Setup CD? It's not coming from the boot.ini file. That much I can see.

SP2 makes significant changes to many files. As such, if any files have been written over by the XP-SP1 CD, if you do not complete the installation you may be left with a non-booting OS anyway.


At the point you're at, the files which initiate the install - as well as appropriate portions of the installation/repair program itself - have already been copied to your hard drive...it only needs the installation CD to copy files from.


That's not entirely true. Boot.ini won't indicate that your setup program is in process, but it is telling your computer where to look for OS files (e.g. "default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS"), & those files are starting the setup/repair program which is already on your HDD.

To explain a bit of the basics of the boot process.... One of the early steps in the preboot sequence is for the system to load the boot sector from the hard disk's active partition into system memory. The boot sector of a hard drive with NT/2K/XP installed on it contains instructions to load the ntldr file (which isn't computer specific, & for the record doesn't initiate the setup program). After you load ntldr, the NT boot sequence starts, & after setting the memory model ntldr loads the mini file-system drivers into memory & starts them (they contain just enough code to read the hard disk & load the rest of the OS from the hard disk).

That's where boot.ini comes into play ... in addition to controlling the startup menu it tells your 'puter where your OS files are located.

But back to the matter at hand, here is the only MSKB article I've found which mentions anything close to steps to abort a Windows installation past the point of no return (not for those afraid of the command line, and after completing the steps you may need to reinstall your OS anyway - in which case you could just start with a reinstall & save time)...

How to manually start the removal process to remove Windows XP

Thanks for the Info
Thanks for the additional info. I went to the link for the MS article and it looks like there's some help there. The big question in my mind now is that the only thing that gets me into the HD is this Norton Recover CD. It lets me modify the boot.ini file (which I did originally to get the computer up again since it had a /NOEXECUTE line in it originally after the hack). But it's a Dynamic disk and NTACCESS can't get into it and I don't know of anything offhand that will get me to the C:\ prompt so that I can run commands. This is a tough one to start with.

That's the primary reason I don't use Dynamic disks...they're harder to support during system failure.

For most people (using basic disks) they could just use a standard Win98 boot floppy to get to a DOS prompt, and if they weren't using FAT32 partitions (which few XP users are) they could use a program like NTFSDOS Pro to allow read/write access to their NTFS partitions in DOS.

I've never tested a Win98 boot disk with dynamic disks, but I very strongly doubt you could get it to work.

However, you can run the Recovery Console off your Windows XP setup CD ...it doesn't support all DOS commands but it may allow all the commands used in that MS KB article...not sure...at the recovery console you can type HELP to get a list of all commands supported.