XP Home to Pro upgrade spins forever

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Guest

Hello, I've been searching around here for a couple of hours to see if anyone
else has had this same problem, but I don't see it.

I have a slightly older Toshiba laptop that came with XP Home edition. I
purchased the XP Pro upgrade immediately and installed it with no problems
(this was over 3 1/2 years ago.) The harddrive was showing signs of failure
so I purchased a new one (same brand, but higher capacity and rotational
speed, and ATA-6 instead of ATA-5 (but compatible, of course.)). After
installation, I ran the system recovery disks that came with the machine, and
I successfully restored the system to XP Home. It seems to work fine there
-- I can connect to the internet and do anything you'd expect to on XP Home.

Now, I'm trying to run through the XP Pro upgrade again. I fill out the
steps for the simple upgrade, and the upgrade then performs the first reboot.
At this point, the first windows logo screen with the sliding bar comes up
(the bar being dark silver) and there it stays with the bar just sliding
forever. After letting it sit for 15+ minutes a couple of times between hard
power cycles, I then let the thing run all night last night. This morning it
was still spinning on that same screen. There is no harddrive activity,
cdrom activity, nothing. The fan is running high, so the CPU is busy, but
that's all I can tell.

I can reboot and select the XP Home selection and it will boot up to there
fine. So, there is no issue I need to sort out with safe-mode as far as I
can tell. Just when I allow it to run the in-progress XP Pro upgrade boot
option, it will spin forever.

The upgrade allows you to do an upgrade (recommended) or a new install.
I've tried both and they exhibit the exact same behavior.

The only differences from the last time I ran the upgrade are the larger
disk and I've flashed the BIOS along the way -- I believe it's at 1.4 now.
If this were a problem, I would've figured the system recovery disks would
not have worked, or XP Home itself would not boot. But I digress...

So, to recap. This is a Home to Pro upgrade on a cleanly restored system.
The only "incompatibility" it reports is Easy CD Creator 5 (yeah, it's that
old) which I'm sure it reported the first time I upgraded as well. I've
tried both connected to the internet and not (allowing it to download updated
files for setup and disallowing it other times.) I am really pretty much out
of ideas, other than reformatting the drive for the 5th time and trying an
absolutely clean install, hoping that my Toshiba system restore disks are one
of the system restore disks recognized as a previous windows version for the
upgrade. But that option leaves me without the virus scanner, to which I've
also only purchased "upgrades" along the way, and the Toshiba utilities. But
I may be able to install those off of the recovery disk at a later time.

In the meantime, any answer as to anything else I should try to allow the
upgrade itself to work without resorting to my final option?

Thanks for your time,

Jeff
 
Reading other random posts, I decided to try hitting F7 during the initial
screen that says hit F6 to install RAID or SCSI drivers. In theory, this
allowed a generic HAL to be loaded (but I won't swear that's what's going on.)

From there it actually quickly got past the initial spinning bar window and
proceeded to install windows. Unfortunately, during the "installing drivers"
phase it blue screens and restarts itself, and then continues this cycle
endlessly.

Time to look around some more, I suppose.
 

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