XP Professional Ghost Image Welcome Screen Hang

[drmengler]

Hi there,

I've cloned my old c:\ drive to a partition on my new drive, using
Norton Ghost,
but I can't get to the login screen. The new drive is sitting in
exactly the same hardware, on the same IDE cable, etc, etc. (ie, the
only thing different in the system is the new hard drive)

Setting the new drive as master, and disconnecting the old drive, the
image boots up fine, goes through the black bootup screen with the
windows logo and progress bar, clears to a blue screen which has the
xp logo on it and the bars top and bottom (which would usually have
the login details in the middle)...

but that's where it stops. The mouse is alive, but I don't get a login
box.

I have found posts relating to this, but no solutions... I've heard
sysprep mentioned but I have no idea what it is or whether it would
help me.

Does anyone know what is stopping XP getting to the login screen?

Cheers,

Matt

 

[dmac]

its usually a sysprep issue. I had better luck with creating a image file
of c drive on a separate partition of the new drive, do integrity check,
remove old c drive and use ghost boot disk to restore from image file to the
new c drive.

--
-----------------------
dmac
(e-mail address removed)
remove 1 to mail
Ati 9800pro 256
P4 2.8 @ 3.1 1gb ddr466
twin seagate 120 sata raid 0

 

[refv2]

Hi there,

I've cloned my old c:\ drive to a partition on my new drive, using
Norton Ghost,
but I can't get to the login screen. The new drive is sitting in
exactly the same hardware, on the same IDE cable, etc, etc. (ie, the
only thing different in the system is the new hard drive)

SNIP

Cheers,

Matt

Matt,

l. Is the new partition other than C:\?
2. I had a similar problem...not exact. Instead of a stall, I
received a missing or corrupted HAL.dll message.

Solved by going in the recovery console (from the cd) and at the
prompt executed bootcfg /rebuild

After answering a few questions, all was fine after a reboot.

HTH and YMMV

Later

 

[I'm Dan]

I've cloned my old c:\ drive to a partition on my new drive,
using Norton Ghost, but I can't get to the login screen. The
new drive is sitting in exactly the same hardware, on the
same IDE cable, etc, etc. (ie, the only thing different in
the system is the new hard drive)

Setting the new drive as master, and disconnecting the old
drive, the image boots up fine, goes through the black bootup
screen with the windows logo and progress bar, clears to a
blue screen which has the xp logo on it and the bars top
and bottom (which would usually have the login details in
the middle)...

That's a classic symptom of munged up partition signatures. You're not
supposed to let old-XP see the new disk before doing the cloning, and you're
not supposed to let new-XP see the old disk before it's booted up at least
once and rebuilt its drive letter table with the new disk signatures.

Since your XP partition is supposed to be "C", then try this trick: remove
the old HDD, boot from a *Win98* boot floppy (download one from
www.bootdisk.com, if necessary), at the DOS prompt run the command "fdisk
/mbr", remove the floppy, reboot from HDD, and see if XP now boots up as
"C".

 

[drmengler]

That's a classic symptom of munged up partition signatures.
Since your XP partition is supposed to be "C", then try this trick: remove
the old HDD, boot from a *Win98* boot floppy (download one from
www.bootdisk.com, if necessary), at the DOS prompt run the command "fdisk
/mbr", remove the floppy, reboot from HDD, and see if XP now boots up as
"C".

Dan,

That did the trick. Thanks! I spent hours making new ghost images,
backing up, restoring, blah blah blah, but in the end, all it took was
a Windows 98 boot disk and a one line command!

Cheers.

 

[I'm Dan]

That did the trick. Thanks! I spent hours making new ghost
images, backing up, restoring, blah blah blah, but in the end, all
it took was a Windows 98 boot disk and a one line command!

You're welcome. FTR (and for anyone else listening in), this trick only
works if XP was originally installed as "C".