Please Help! Can't complete 2000 upgrade to XP; repeated reboots

[Guest]

I'm in serious trouble. I'm about halfway through upgrading Win 2000 pro to
XP pro and I'm getting repeated reboots. For about a half second I can see
the blue screen with a message, then the PC reboots before I can read it.

KB article 314466 seems to address this, but when I try to use the Recovery
Console to disable automatic restart, I get a 'password not valid' message
when prompted to type in the administrator password (there was never any
admin password when I was running under Win 2000).

KB article 308402 seems to address the 'password not valid' situation, but
when I downloaded the XP setup disks for floppy boot and re-ran Recovery
Console, the PC booted again (this time w/o blue screen) and put me back to
square one with my problem...

As you can see I've tried to solve this on my own (spending most of the day
now) and am at a dead end.

Can anyone please suggest something else I can try??

Thanks sincerely...

 

[Walter Clayton]

Without know the details of the error message, it's pure guess work as to
what the problem may be.

One thing you might attempt is to use RC to disable any 3rd party startup
tasks and services, especially AV, firewall and packet writing software.

 

[Guest]

Thanks very much for the response. Unfortunately I can't get to RC because
it keeps asking me for an administrator password. It won't accept a carriage
return, and I don't remember ever setting one up in the previous OS (2000).

Do you know of an app or patch that can get around the admin password for RC?

 

[Walter Clayton]

I glossed right over that. :-/

Try this then. Go to http://www.nu2.nu and grab BartsPE. You'll need access
to either SP1 or SP2 install media though. With that you can create a
bootable CD that will let you get into the registry of the machine with
issues so you can manually disable startup items.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

Try the Universal Boot CD (free) at http://www.ubcd4win.com/