Windows XP Won't Finish Starting

[Guest]

I'm running XP Home Edition SP2. When I try and start windows the initial
booting screen (with the progress bar) appears, then the main screen with the
windows logo appears, but the login screen never appears. Looking and the
disk activity LED on my computer, there is a lot of initial disk activity,
but then almost all disk activity stops. Eventually the fan controller
drivers kick in an my fans go to normal speed - so things get that far.
ctrl-alt-del has no effect.

I've tried restarting In every combination of safe-mode, and I've tried
booting the last know good configuration, but all lead to the same problem, a
logo screen with no login and then nothing more.

Back story. A while ago my hard disk failed. It was failing for a while so
when I got a replacement disk my only good (Acronis) backups were from
August. I ran the Acronis recovery CD, partitioned the new disk and restored
the disk. Everything booted just fine - except the Acronis recovery set a
screwy partition label on my disk. After restoring my user files (from other
backup copies) I ran a full backup of my disk again - and there were no
errors.

I then reformatted my disk with my Maxtor disk utilities floppy. Next I
partitioned the disk with my Partition Magic recovery floppy. Finally I ran
the Acronis restore again and it finnished with no errors. Now Windows XP
starts to boot up but never finishes.

Can anyone think of anything else I can try to find out what's going wrong?

 

[Pop`]

I'm running XP Home Edition SP2. When I try and start windows the
initial booting screen (with the progress bar) appears, then the main
screen with the windows logo appears, but the login screen never
appears. Looking and the disk activity LED on my computer, there is a
lot of initial disk activity, but then almost all disk activity
stops. Eventually the fan controller drivers kick in an my fans go to
normal speed - so things get that far. ctrl-alt-del has no effect.

I've tried restarting In every combination of safe-mode, and I've
tried booting the last know good configuration, but all lead to the
same problem, a logo screen with no login and then nothing more.

Back story. A while ago my hard disk failed. It was failing for a
while so when I got a replacement disk my only good (Acronis) backups
were from August. I ran the Acronis recovery CD, partitioned the new
disk and restored the disk. Everything booted just fine - except the
Acronis recovery set a screwy partition label on my disk. After
restoring my user files (from other backup copies) I ran a full
backup of my disk again - and there were no errors.

I then reformatted my disk with my Maxtor disk utilities floppy. Next
I partitioned the disk with my Partition Magic recovery floppy.
Finally I ran the Acronis restore again and it finnished with no
errors. Now Windows XP starts to boot up but never finishes.

Can anyone think of anything else I can try to find out what's going
wrong?

Failing someone with better advise coming along, and reading your last two
paras closely, I think you should reinstall XP from the git-go and use XP to
set partitions on the boot disk. I've seen quite a few unexplained problems
using 3rd party partitionware on installs.
Boot from the XP CD, delete the partitions, all of them, and recreate at
least your one boot partition but preferable whatever else you need on that
physical drive up to 4 partitions. You can use PM or whatever later, AFTER
the installation is completed.
So, boot, delete partitions, recreate, format, and go from there with the
install.

My two cents

Pop`

 

[Guest]

Failing someone with better advise coming along, and reading your last two
paras closely, I think you should reinstall XP from the git-go and use XP to
set partitions on the boot disk. I've seen quite a few unexplained problems
using 3rd party partitionware on installs.
Boot from the XP CD, delete the partitions, all of them, and recreate at
least your one boot partition but preferable whatever else you need on that
physical drive up to 4 partitions. You can use PM or whatever later, AFTER
the installation is completed.
So, boot, delete partitions, recreate, format, and go from there with the
install.

My two cents

Pop`

It may come down to doing a reinstall. Unfortunately I have a Sony Vaio
which does not come with a real Window XP CD, but a bunch of OEM OS Recovery
disks. These have no practical tools for partitioning the disk the right way
- rather it gives you two choices of standard (but stupid) partition sizes.

I'm really trying to avoid the reinstall route - otherwise what's the point
of having backup software if you have to reinstall the OS every time your HD
fails. Also, the first time I did a restore, Windows booted just fine.

What I'm wondering is could this be a registry problem? Could the registry
or some other system files have been in transition when the most recent
backup was done?

Also, it seems kind of wierd that Windows would just go into la-la land
before the login screen appears, without giving any kinds of warning messages.

Anyway, thanks for the advice - as I said, it make come down to that.

Cheers, Eric