Oldstone Place

The other day I was trying to get an unattended Windows XP CD to work in a virtual machine, but by mistake I ran it on my physical PC instead, doh! I thought I canceled it in time, before it had a chance to do any damage to my Windows installation, and I was able to continue using the PC as usual.

But when I rebooted my PC today it displayed the following error:

INF file txtsetup.sif is corrupt or missing, status 14.
Setup cannot continue. Press any key to exit.

I rebooted a couple of times and tried to hit F8 to get to a boot menu, but no luck. Normally if you time it right, hitting F8 before Windows XP starts loading will let you select Last Known Good Configuration or Safe Mode.

I booted from an XP installation CD and tried to get to the Microsoft Windows Recovery Console, but it simply said that it could not detect any hard disks and the only option was to press F3 to restart. That recovery console really sucks!

Next I tried the trusty Ubuntu live CD. For some reason it wouldn’t boot into the normal Ubuntu – the graphics kept going haywire – so I booted into the Safe Graphics mode instead. From Ubuntu I was able to see the Windows XP partitions and verified that all the files were still there.

I did notice that the aborted XP installation had managed to add a line in C:\BOOT.INI on the primary partition so it looked like the Windows installation had overwritten some boot files. I edited BOOT.INI to remove the offending lines, but rebooting into XP still gave the same “txtsetup.sif is corrupt or missing” error.

Next I tried a Windows 98 boot CD, but naturally it couldn’t see the NTFS partition with the XP installation. I was about to try an fdisk /mbr but decided to try one more option with Ubuntu.

Heres what worked…

1. If you don’t already have a Ubuntu live CD, download and burn one.
• Download an Ubuntu ISO.
• Use a CD ROM burning application like CDBurnerXP to burn the ISO to a DVD.
2. From a working Windows XP PC, copy BOOT.INI, ntldr and NTDETECT.COM from the C:\ drive to a USB stick.
• If you don’t see these files in your C: drive then start Windows Explorer. In the Tools menu, click Folder Options. Click the View tab.
• Click to select “Show hidden files and folders” is selected, and remove the check from “Hide protected operating system files”.
• Now copy the three files to an easily recognizable folder on your USB stick, for example if your stick is drive H:, copy the files into H:\Recover
3. Boot Ubuntu on the crashed PC. Boot into safe graphics mode if you have problems with your video card.
4. Insert the USB stick. Ubuntu should recognize it.
5. Now copy those three files from the USB stick to your disk.
6. Reboot and hopefully your Windows XP is running again.
7. You may get warnings that some files are the wrong version.