XP Home Won't Boot...

[Guest]

I have tried to run recovery CD. Boot ini, MBR, no help. I Downloaded
"Bootmaster' and it says that my boot partitions are good. I am not sure
where to go next. I was originally trying to Mirror my existing HDD with a
new HDD (WD) using the LifeGuard tool. It did copy and labeled the drives
according..however it did not make my new HDD bootable. I went to repeat the
process..(thinking I might have missed a step). Now I have removed the "new"
HDD and replaced with the original one...now it wont boot. The data and the
partitions are present..in other words I did not accidentaly overwrite or
format the wrong drive.
Any suggestions? Restarting in "Safe Mode" or from a restore point was also
unsuccessful.

Thanks for any advice.

Thomas

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

I have tried to run recovery CD. Boot ini, MBR, no help. I Downloaded
"Bootmaster' and it says that my boot partitions are good. I am not sure
where to go next. I was originally trying to Mirror my existing HDD with
a
new HDD (WD) using the LifeGuard tool. It did copy and labeled the drives
according..however it did not make my new HDD bootable. I went to repeat
the
process..(thinking I might have missed a step). Now I have removed the
"new"
HDD and replaced with the original one...now it wont boot. The data and
the
partitions are present..in other words I did not accidentaly overwrite or
format the wrong drive.
Any suggestions? Restarting in "Safe Mode" or from a restore point was
also
unsuccessful.

Thanks for any advice.

Thomas

You should start by reporting how far the boot process goes
and what messages (if any) you see on the screen. It is also
unclear what you did with your hard disks.

 

[DL]

When you use such a disk utility to clone your hd to a new one, once the
process has completed you have to shutdown the pc, disconect old drive &
connect new as master before you reboot
If this doesnt work then the clone is no good

 

[Guest]

Sorry,
My original HDD boots to the blue windows screen and never changes to the
login screen. I never get any message it just sits there. I am using my
original HDD, I went to clone it because I was worried that it was about to
go out. It was making a lot of seek noise with increased seek times.

Thanks for responding
Thomas

 

[Guest]

After the process completed i did as instructed: shut down, removed old
installed only new. I would not boot either. I verified that the partitions
and data was present, however, the primary boot partition (C was not
bootable. I was unclear as how to make it "bootable" so thinking that I
missed a step, I started the process over and that is when my original HDD
started giving me problems. Sorry, I was not very detailed last night. I was
frustrated and up late.

Thanks for your reply.

Thomas

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

If your mirroring process was OK then you should be able
to boot the machine with a WinXP boot floppy disk. You can
make one like so:
- Format a floppy disk on some other WinXP/2000 PC.
Don't do it on a Win9x PC - it won't work.
- Copy these files from the \i386 folder of your WinXP CD to A:\
ntldr
ntdetect.com
- Create a file a:\boot.ini with these lines inside:
[boot loader]
timeout=10
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="1 Microsoft Windows XP
Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="2 Microsoft Windows XP
Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS="3 Microsoft Windows XP
Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=OptIn

Note that the last three lines start with the word "multi", even
though your newsreader might break them into two or three
lines.

Now boot the machine with each of the options you
see until you get it going. Remember to tell the BIOS
to boot off the floppy disk drive!