Accidentally compressed the Hard Drive!

Accidentally compressed the Hard Drive!

This is indeed a risky problem. From what I was able to understand in your issue, you compressed the whole system drive. Meaning, you compressed the drive wherein your Windows is stored, like the C Drive. If that's the thing, then absolutely, XP won’t be able to start. There are three solutions that will work on the problem, and because your issue is quite delicate, these are the only 3 known solutions that will work.

Before I provide the solution, let me give you a background in which I will explain why XP won’t start with a compressed drive. Being an old OS from Microsoft, XP uses a file called NTLDR as a boot loader that loads your Boot.ini file. Since a compressed file needs to be uncompressed first before any instructions, XP can’t be loaded because the decompression tool is not available outside the operating system. With this, you might be able to understand why there’s only three possible solutions to your problem.

• Just Re-Install Windows. Of course, you will lose all your documents and pictures and other programs that you have installed. But this is the fastest way in getting your computer back up and running, since re-installing windows will give you the opportunity to format the drive, thus removing the compression. If you have a lot of important files that’s in the hard drive and you do not have any back up copy, then you can try solution number 2 instead.

• For this solution, you will need an XP Installation CD. This is because we need to get into the Recovery Console. If you do not have an Installation CD then you might want to try the last solution. If you have the installation CD then follow the steps below:

1. Insert the Installation CD for Windows XP in your CD/DVD drive and turn your computer on.

2. You will be prompted to “Press Any Key to Boot From CD”, all you need to do is press any key. I suggest pressing the space bar. If you are not prompted with the option to press any key, then restart your computer and press “F12” once you see the logo for the manufacturer of your computer. Then select CD/DVD Drive and press enter. After that, you should get the message, and just press the spacebar.

3. Once you are on the screen that welcomes you to the installation process for Windows, you’ll see three options, just press the letter “R” key to repair the operating system Via Recovery Console.

4. If you are asked to choose “Which Windows Installation Would You Like to Log on to?”, just type in “1” and press “Enter”. Then type in the password for the administrator. If you do not have a password, just leave it blank and press “Enter”.

5. You will be in a command line environment. Here, just type in “CD ” (without the quotes) and press “Enter”. Then type in “ATTRIB –C NTLDR” (again without the quotes) and press “Enter”.

6. Take out the XP CD from your computer, type “EXIT” and press “Enter”.

7. Your computer should now be able to boot into windows.
 

•  In case the above solutions did not work, your last option is to take the hard drive out, and put it in another computer running Windows XP, and remove the compression.