Fellow Professionals:

I have encountered this core problem a number of times.
Basically, the system boots to the system partition (C,
and then prompts for the Ctrl-Atl-Del keystroke to login.
Ctrl-Alt-Del is pressed, and valid credentials entered.
The workstation begins to load the profile, and then
abrubtly returns to the Ctrl-Alt-Del banner. I would like
to correct the problem, as blowing away and reloading the
system is a frustration, and I have just done this
recently for the same problem.

The backstory is this. I frequently use my workstation to
connect laptop hard drives in efforts to recover data.
Usually, I can boot up my system, and pull My Docs, etc.
off of a damaged drive mounted as F:. However, for
whatever reason, my workstation will want to restart
to 'finish installing new hardware.' This is the bullet.
Sometimes I can dodge it, sometimes I can't. After I
restart, my workstation comes back up with the laptop hard
drive as the system partition (C, and my original system
partition as (F. Also, it does something with my
pagefile, and I'll typically get the message about my
pagefile is either too small, or missing, with
instructions on how to fix it.

If anyone has encountered this before and has a workable
solution, please respond. I am desperately trying to
avoid blowing my system away and reloading it, simply
because of the time and hassle involved.

Thank you!
Chris

Chris,

Ensure that your C: drive on your workstation is on Disk 0 and you can use
Fdisk to ensure that the partition is marked active. Disk 0 needs to be on
the controller as the Primary Master. When you have disk drive changes,
on solution is to go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices and delete
values in the MountedDevices key.

Regards,
Ken Simmons
Microsoft Technical Support for Platforms and Business Applications

"Chris Kuebler" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:086301c3b844$abc46e50$(E-Mail Removed)...
> Fellow Professionals:
>
> I have encountered this core problem a number of times.
> Basically, the system boots to the system partition (C,
> and then prompts for the Ctrl-Atl-Del keystroke to login.
> Ctrl-Alt-Del is pressed, and valid credentials entered.
> The workstation begins to load the profile, and then
> abrubtly returns to the Ctrl-Alt-Del banner. I would like
> to correct the problem, as blowing away and reloading the
> system is a frustration, and I have just done this
> recently for the same problem.
>
> The backstory is this. I frequently use my workstation to
> connect laptop hard drives in efforts to recover data.
> Usually, I can boot up my system, and pull My Docs, etc.
> off of a damaged drive mounted as F:. However, for
> whatever reason, my workstation will want to restart
> to 'finish installing new hardware.' This is the bullet.
> Sometimes I can dodge it, sometimes I can't. After I
> restart, my workstation comes back up with the laptop hard
> drive as the system partition (C, and my original system
> partition as (F. Also, it does something with my
> pagefile, and I'll typically get the message about my
> pagefile is either too small, or missing, with
> instructions on how to fix it.
>
> If anyone has encountered this before and has a workable
> solution, please respond. I am desperately trying to
> avoid blowing my system away and reloading it, simply
> because of the time and hassle involved.
>
> Thank you!
> Chris