New hardware with old C drive and XP SP3: boot issue questions

[David Teich]

I moved back to the US with a good hard drive. Just bought the same brand mb
(Gigabyte) and CPU (AMD), a box and other stuff, and at tempted to boot.

I first started with a boot from XP CD, just to do a quick repair for new hw
recognition. However, it wanted me to enter the pwd for admin. The problem?
It wouldn't recognize my admin pwd. What's the default one? Maybe the CD
ignores what I set.

Then I booted from the hard drive. It got to the login and I successfully
entered my pwd. It asked me if I wanted to Reactivate now, I said now. It
started going through the startup tray programs and then rebooted. Since
then, when I try to boot in Safe Mode or regular, it just seems to hang.

I'm trying to save my old install, rather than having to reinstall not only
Windows but all my apps. Given what's happened, any suggestions for how to
get it to boot properly?

thanx in advance!

 

[David B.]

There is no default admin password, it is not password protected. Clear the
admin password using anyone of the free utilities available for download on
the web, although when performing a repair installation I don't believe
you'll be prompted for a password, only if you try to use the recovery
console.

 

[David Teich]

When I've done a Repair, it has always ended up at the console and then I've
done nothing except exit. However, the console prompt is what let's me know
it's finished the basics. I'll try skipping the login next time, but it gave
me that prompt before I could get to the DOS prompt.

As for the utilities, how do they work unless you can boot into at least the
console?

David

 

[Hunter01]

The repair console comes up prior to the automated repair, don't go into
the console and just continue on as if you were going to do an install,
it'll detect the partition/drive with windows already on it and give you
the option to run an automated repair against it then.

 

[David Teich]

Just getting back to it after some other things came up. This time, the XP CD
won't even book up. It's freezing during loading files at "Promise Technology
Inc Ultra IDE Controller.

Any clue why that might choke on the Gigabyte mb, when it worked on a
slightly earlier version?

thanx,
David

 

[David Teich]

I got it to boot into windows, but now the OS keeps asking me for the
amdk8.sys file. It's not on the XP CD. Any clue where it's hiding?

david