Back in my old crowded Windows
Īsās ziņas: mistiski nelādējošos Logus, šķiet, var veiksmīgi atdzīvināt ar Linux dzīvo CD.

Some days ago there had been a power hiccup or something at night, after which my Windows XP loaded no more. In Safe Mode, it hung after mup.sys, which Google said to be a classic symptom to plenty of different possible causes.

I brought in a fresh Linux Mint 8 DVD with the hope that it would allow for out-of-the-box boxing with the problem. Instead it hung at the out-of-the-box disk mounting stage or so it seemed, for a few dumbfounded booting attempts. I wanted to install it on a free partition that I had, to quickly finish a few urgent jobs that didn't require Windows, but the installer did not out-of-the-box recognize my partitions.

(The Repair option from the Windows CD didn't work either, it hung/did foo beyond my patience.)

Then I used an older Kubuntu 6 disk, which was at least slightly more responsive. Its installer, too, acted as if it had no idea of the existing partitions, so I started to suspect something wrong with the partition table. But I saw /dev/hdaN and was able to mount both Windows NTFS and data FAT32 manually, and sfdisk showed credible structure after all, with some warnings which I had no clue about as to how bad they were; taking that (primarily my cluelessness) into account I decided to postpone playing with the MBR and instead search for Windows cures workable from Linux.

Long story short, the steps from http://www.arsgeek.com/2008/02/27/use-your-ubuntu-partition-to-fix-a-corrupt-registry-on-a-windows-xp-partition/ seem to have fixed the issue.