winxp boot failing at blue welcome screen

shmish

New Member
Hi,

I had a dual boot install on a 500gb drive. I moved this to a 300gb drive using Acronis True Image. After backing up then restoring the partitions on the new drive I had to use the Vista recovery to get the bootloader working again (Vista on 1st partition, Xp on 2nd partition). I then used EasyBCD to get the dual boot working.

Now when I boot into WinXP, the boot process stalls when I get the blue screen and windows logo, just before the user logon part. I don't think there is much I can do about this to fix it but would like to hear suggestions if there are any.

I can't quite remember: is it possible to use the WinXP cd to repair and installation? Or is it either reinstall or recovery console (which won't help me I don't think). I'm also guessing that if I can and do use the CD for a repair that i'll have to go back and do the Vista repair again, then EasyBCD to add WinXP again.

any thoughts on this are appreciated
thanks!
 
Yes use the XP CD to do a repair install. But after the repair install you will have to recover the Vista bootloader again.

After that the BCD should already have XP added and the dual boot should work as expected.
 
I have the same problem with Win XP after restoring a Win7 and Win XP partition (both formerly bootable from the Win 7 boot menu edited with Easy BCD) .

I can see the blue background and the windows logo for hours (with periodic disk action) but do not get to the Win XP logon screen, while the mouse is responding.

I tried to boot with the Win XP installation cd and selected RECOVERY. Then he asks me to insert the recovery FLOPPY.
My problem: I have no floppy on my laptop AND i have no recovery disks prepared earlier.

Then I booted again with the Win XP installation disk. This time I waited until he offers to press R and start the recovery console.
There I selected the drive letter with the Win XP partition and used FIXBOOT and FIXMBR.
Both said they where successful.
After EXITing the console I booted again.


Nothing had changed. The boot menu still offers Win 7 (that still comes up) and Win XP (which leaves me waiting at the screen with the blue background and with no chance to log on).


What can I do?
 
Last edited:
what can i do now?

Thank you Terry for your answer and link to http://www.goodells.net/multiboot/partsigs.shtml


But none of the partitions where move. I restored them with Ghost 15 after I yesterday saved them with the same version of Ghost.


And I restored them to them both to the exact position where they came from.


What is different now is that I switched from Ghost 12 to 15 and when restoring with it at the end he says “Error EA730002: Cannot find the driver database directory ”.


But according to http://community.norton.com/t5/Othe...y-disk-quot-when-use-norton-ghost/td-p/179737 this message “just some annoying bug which clearly does not affect the recovery of your computer“.


Do you have any idea what I can do now?


Thanks a lot.
 
The symptoms definitely sound like a letter-change, however it happened.
Your reply to Mak doesn't sound like you've tried the repair install yet ?
It's not the repair console , it's the install option, then choosing to repair (or in-place upgrade) rather than replace.
 
Back
Top