A Black Screen (Not the BSOD)

S

seattlerust

Member
Yesterday I made a clean install of WInXP SP2 after slipstreaming the SP2 and SATA drivers onto a new CD. It worked fine and then with EasyBCD, I set up the dual boot. This was on my Vista 64 bit machine. All worked as expected and I went to bed happy. This morning, I booted into Vista and worked for awhile, then shut down and rebooted intending to go to XP. The dual-boot option came up and I selected XP but then it proceeded to show a black screen and nothing more. Only shutting down could recover. I tried a few things with EasyBCD and occasionally instead of the Black Screen, I got a message that the OS was not working and I needed to do a repair. I did not try that.

Any advice will be appreciated.

SR

Sorry, need to mention that the XP is installed on a separate SATA HD that I installed in the machine.

SR
 
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Did you use EasyBCD 2.0 latest build to add the XP entry to the Vista BCD.
The black screen is normally a symptom that you have not got ntdetect.com in the "system" partition.
With Easy1.7 you need to make sure copies of the XP files are in the right pace manually and edit boot.ini yourself.
Easy2 will do all that for you. Just accept its offer to "auto-configure" after deleting and re-adding the XP entry. (don't change the drive assignment it uses for XP).
If that's not your problem, does XP still boot if you F8-override the BIOS boot sequence or put XP top of the HDD sequence in the BIOS setup ?
 
The Black Screen

Hi Terry,

Thanks for the reply. In fact, while waiting for help, I went back and re-read the "FAQs - Please read......" and found the discussion about the Black Screen and other materials that I had read before but did not then have the relavance that it does now. By following info there I solved the problem, basically as you just noted in your reply. So all is well at this moment. Thank you for a great treasure trove if information on this subject.

SR
 
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