xp repair reinstall hang

[Guest]

Background: customer brought a Dell Dimension 4300 into the shop that had
started getting a blue screen on every bootup. Rand Recovery Console chkdsk
/r 3 times (rebooting into RC between each run) which found and fixed
problems, but the system still blue screened on boot up. The system had
originally been pre-sp1, later upgraded to both sp1 and sp2.

The customer's XP Home Upgrade CD (pre-sp1) was used to go through a repair
reinstall, which completed, along with the usual com+ and other setup errors
that occur when doing a repair reinstall with a downlevel OS CD. On the first
non-setup boot, after displaying the xp boot banner w/progress bar, it went
to a black screen with the mouse pointer, and that is all the further it will
go. All disk activity ceases, but numlock still toggles and the mouse pointer
still moves.

Since I have repaired a number of xp installations with a downlevel CD, I
didn't anticipate this problem, but figuring it might have something to do
with it, I took his CD and slipstreamed sp2 into it, and burnt a cd, ran the
repair reinstall again, but it gets stuck at the same place.

The repair reinstall completes the blue screen phase (copying files),
reboots in order to go into the GUI phase, and this is where the screen goes
black, with just the mouse pointer.

Any ideas on what might be causing this, and how to recover from it? As is
our shop practice, I am trying to preserve their programs, etc.

 

[Alias]

Background: customer brought a Dell Dimension 4300 into the shop that had
started getting a blue screen on every bootup. Rand Recovery Console chkdsk
/r 3 times (rebooting into RC between each run) which found and fixed
problems, but the system still blue screened on boot up. The system had
originally been pre-sp1, later upgraded to both sp1 and sp2.

The customer's XP Home Upgrade CD (pre-sp1) was used to go through a repair
reinstall, which completed, along with the usual com+ and other setup errors
that occur when doing a repair reinstall with a downlevel OS CD. On the first
non-setup boot, after displaying the xp boot banner w/progress bar, it went
to a black screen with the mouse pointer, and that is all the further it will
go. All disk activity ceases, but numlock still toggles and the mouse pointer
still moves.

Since I have repaired a number of xp installations with a downlevel CD, I
didn't anticipate this problem, but figuring it might have something to do
with it, I took his CD and slipstreamed sp2 into it, and burnt a cd, ran the
repair reinstall again, but it gets stuck at the same place.

The repair reinstall completes the blue screen phase (copying files),
reboots in order to go into the GUI phase, and this is where the screen goes
black, with just the mouse pointer.

Any ideas on what might be causing this, and how to recover from it? As is
our shop practice, I am trying to preserve their programs, etc.

Perhaps it's a hardware problem?

Alias

 

[Guest]

Perhaps it's a hardware problem?

Not likely. Since my last post, I did a parallel install from the same
slipstreamed CD, and this boots up normally.

 

[Guest]

Could you give more details on the parallel install?
I don't understand what you mean?
My first thought was bad video card!

 

[Guest]

Could you give more details on the parallel install?
I don't understand what you mean?

A parallel install is where you go through setup and tell it to install the
OS into a new directory (e.g. \windows.new), which leaves the old OS install
undisturbed. It is a non-destructive way of making sure that some hardware
issue isn't blocking setup.

My first thought was bad video card!

If it were a video card, it probably would not have made it through the
graphic phase of setup.