Windows Explored

One morning we started encountering complaints of several Windows XP workstations that booted with the following message: “Windows failed to start… File: \windows\system32\boot\winload.exe. Status: 0xc000035a. Info: Attempting to load a 64-bit application, however this CPU is not compatible with 64-bit mode.”

Bizarre. To understand how bizarre you need to know that these are all old workstations, 32 bit processor only, that are/were running Windows XP Professional. The message above is not any Windows XP message. The Boot Manager is part of Windows Vista and later, as well winloader.exe. Examining a couple of the workstations, I could see the problem was a missing NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM, and boot.ini. There was also the presence of the Win Vista/7 bootmgr file (the result of booting into the WinPE environment), which is what was responsible for the above message:

As it turned out, our office was the victim of an unannounced SCCM task that had run earlier in the morning to enable a setting in the BIOS. The details behind the issue are not yet fully known but I suspect this boiled down to:

“Running 64-bit Custom Task Sequence Programs Using the Task Sequence Environment Will Fail
A 64-bit custom task sequence program using the task sequence environment variable deployed to a Configuration Manager 2007 client on a 64-bit operating system will fail. This failure occurs when the task sequence program attempts to load the 64-bit task sequence environment COM object because the client is 32-bit even on 64-bit operating systems.”

With the vast number of workstations being 64-bit compatible, this was not a problem. The NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM, and boot.ini were placed back into the root of the drive once the SCCM task completed. On the other hand, the 32-bit only workstations could not complete the task.

To resolve the issue, required some old-school knowledge of Windows XP Recovery. It is essentially the same thing as addressing the “NTLDR is missing…” error message encountered after a system post. I hadn’t done this in so long that I had to review the available commands from the Recovery Console (help). Fixing requires booting from the Windows XP CD and going into the Recovery Console, then:

1. Select the affected Windows Install (1 on a single OS system)
2. Enter the local admin password
3. Input the following commands to copy the missing (or corrupted) NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM:
   • Copy d:\i386\ntldr c:\
   • Copy d:\i386\ntdetect.com c:\
4. Input the following commands to fix the boot configuration and MBR:
   1. Bootcfg /rebuild
      • Microsoft Windows XP Professional (actually, you can call it whatever you want)
      • /noexecute=optin /fastfetct
   2. Fixboot
   3. FixMbr
5. Reboot