Startup hangs at blue Windows XP Logo screen

[Guest]

The system was working well, with SP2 loaded many months ago. A Promise
Fasttrak 100 IDE RAID board was installed, replacing a USB-2/Firewire/NIC
board. The driver installation was uneventful and everything worked
perfectly, with the system undergoing multiple reboots for driver
installation, etc.

The last thing done was to run Maxtor's MAXBLAST program to copy data from 3
volumes on one IDE drive to the single drive attached to the IDE RAID
controller. This also succeeded with no problems.

The system was shut down overnight pending the installation of a drive
cooling fan.

The next day the cooling fans were installed, the system brought up -
almost. It stopped in the boot process at the last screen before the standard
Windows XP logon window. It stops at the blue screen with the "Windows XP"
logo in the center.

If I quickly enter Alt-TAB, then a choice of two programs is given: WINLOGON
and Windows Login. Attempts at switching to one or the other makes no
difference. The system still hangs at the blue screen. CTRL-ALT-DEL (once,
twice, whatever) makes no difference.

The file shares are accessible over the LAN from other systems. The
ntbtlog.txt reveals no problems as far as I can tell, with the last file
loaded being secdrv.sys.

The system always boots to the same screen, regardless of whether or not it
is in SAFE mode or not, or any permutation of this or even the "last known
good version".

Removing the new disk, etc., makes no difference either.

As far as I can tell it would appear that the XP kernel is running, but not
perhaps a valid windows logon program.

Any suggestions?

I *really* do not want to re-install the operating system. It would take
several days to reinstall the application software - presuming I can locate
the media upon which it was located and download the patches they require all
over again.

 

[Guest]

You should have some kind of restorable backup system that you can fall back
on when disasters such as this one strike.

Have a loo at this page for a solution:

http://www.pcbuyerbeware.co.uk/Windows.htm

Eric,
PC Buyer Beware!
http://www.pcbuyerbeware.co.uk/

 

[Guest]

Well, I did have a backup of all my data, and the system drive itself is
unbesmirched - with the exception of whatever caused the OS to hiccup.

Anyway, thanks for the link. It eventually put me onto three things that
helped solve the problem: BartPE, the Offline NT Password Editor
(http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/), and a Microsoft Knowledgebase
page. The http://www.theeldergeek.com web site was indispensable in providing
a lot of hints and tricks, too.

I ended up booting BartPE (though since I had misplaced my WindowsXP Full CD
and only had the Upgrade CD BartPE was *very* tedious to create!). With
BartPE I had visibility into the system volume so I made copies of the
registry hives and the WPA* (Windows Product Activation) files, replaced the
hives with the ones in the Repair folder, zapped the Administrator password,
booted in Safe Mode, recovered a recent snapshot copy of the registry hives,
booted BartPE, replaced the repair copies of the registry with the snapshot
copies, replaced the WPA* files and booted up the now working system.

The only thing subsequently needed was to reinstall the Promise RAID
controller driver. Once that was done things were perfectly fine - though
System Restore insists that there were no restore points available to
complete the Microsoft Knowledgebase fix. I guess one should trust diving
into the System Volume Information folder directly to provide the true story.
There were at least 25 snapshots there, going back a month or so.

Now I have a backup of the system's Windows folder, though the #&^#$& backup
utility seems to have troubles backing up the registry. Smart, eh? At least
there is a copy I made of it on another hard drive.

I think the problem might have been due to some weirdness with the Microsoft
Product Activation software. When the registry was restored but the WPA*
files had not yet been copied back XP kept telling me that the OS needed to
be activated. Perhaps MS has a bug in that part of their code.

Thanks for your help.

Michael