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I have Win XP Pro, divided in two installations, one for internet and word, the other for my studio. I use BootMagic for it.

Everything has been great so far. Today, when starting up the PC, Win XP would not load. BootMagic shows itself as usual, there I have to two partitions, you have to chose one to go in. I have chosen the Studio one, Win XP gets stack into the loading first page, the one with the little tiny animation in blue colour. I reseted it, and went to try loading the office side of the partition, in this side, Win XP starts, gets to the first loading page, and then suddenly everything becomes black, there is absolutely nothing else. I did id in several ways, tried different ideas, but there is no way to load the OS.

I have checked the hardware side, there is nothing you could think it would be doing it, at all. I’ve got to the BIOS to check for problems, everything is right. It seems as if for some strange reason, Win XP would have had some important files deleted, which is impossible.

I don’t know what to do, don’t know were to start. If I cannot load one of both, there is no possible way to get to know what is going on, an fixing it.

Any ideas on what I could do, what do you think is going on, a Trojan virus or something like that? Please, give me a little hand. Cheers.

sounds tricky. have a go at 1 of these.

- disabling everything in the bios and/or reset to default settings.

- press F8??? during xp bootup. select the safe mode, i think there's also a debug/verbose mode, useful for seeing where's stuck

- remove all perpherials from ya pc, cw cards, additional hdds, cdroms etc. All you want is the main hdd and video card.

...sounds like the registry files are corrupt. another reason why having two xp installations on 1 HDD is very dangerous. You should get the removable HDD kits and a new hdd, keep things seperate...

Nestor, if Soul's suggestions (good starting point) don't work, you can always run an XP repair from the XP installation CD. It will rebuild the OS and leave all your installed programs intact. You have to reset your tweaks afterward, and rerun SP1 (if your XP disk is pre SP1), but you'll be up and running in a half hour.
The best method is to have a recent Ghost or Drive Image backup - then you'll be restored in minutes.

I've encountered this before, but never both OS's on my multi-boot at the same time. Sounds like BootMagic corrupted the MBR. Maybe you can restore the MBR from BootMagic (I use System Commander which has this function).

I still recommend multi-boot systems. Screw-ups can happen in any system. Multi-boot gives you lots of options. I've been using it for years, they're very reliable and stable.

/dave

Thanks very much guys for your answers.

Well, this is the weirdest problem I ever had!

I left the PC to its barebones, nothing… the problem persists. Most curious of all, the Win XP screen became a glued ghost, and stayed there forever.

Soul:
BootMagic is a magnificent program and I have used it for almost 6 years already, the only thing I’ve got from it is benefits and very few problems, for misusing it myself.

I already tried several of the options for entering with the F8 command, but Win XP will just not let me in, in every occasion, or the loading screen takes forever, or it gests black, with a white cursor in the top left side of the screen.

I followed your recommendation and uninstalled all hardware, look for any little detail possible, but nothing evident has shown at all.

Hey Dbmac:
My XP is SP1 ready, so no problems if I were to come back the way you suggest. I’ve never done it before, I’ll have to try.

Actually, I do have two Ghosts, the first is Win XP and all the drivers, and the second has all the programs and configuration, but I doesn’t allow me to get there. I use TrueImage, a great program. When I get into it, it tells me that those images are not TrueImage images, bizarre.

There MBR isn’t corrupt, I know because BootMagic works perfectly well, i.e., before I get into the problems, BootMagic actually shows me the menu with the two partitions ready to be loaded… if there was a corrupt MBR, it tells you immediately. I already had this, and all you have to do is to use the rescue BootMagic disc, and everything is done in a minute.

I must go for a few days, it is a matter of work, so I am forced to leave the system waiting like this… I hate it, but I’ll come back and restart my trying to find a solution. Thanks very much for your answers, and hope to be giving you soon good news. Cheers.

I have this aswell sometimes.It usually happens when I load cerain drivers or a specific program.What about your Graphics card?Have you tried to boot in soft mode?

...sounds like the registry files are corrupt. another reason why having two xp installations on 1 HDD is very dangerous. You should get the removable HDD kits and a new hdd, keep things seperate...

Using boot magic is very much like having two hardisks. It works at a much lower level than the built in dual boot in windows xp. The partitions are completey hidden from each other as they are all C: partitions and you can only boot into one. So each of Nestors windows XP boot partitions will have their own registry file.

I also suspect the graphic card - there's a couple of resolution switches during boot process and the the monitor doesn't support the final setting it just switches off.

Just as an example: if it switches to TV mode (which some cards can do) the monitor blocks immediately - it has to, as the signal would kill it within a couple of minutes.

Can you hear the harddisk continue to work while the screen is dark ?
Or check the machine's network presence ?
Otherwise just try with any video card.

fingers crossed, Tom

I used to use BootMagic in the same exact way when I used Win98 and it worked great. Theoretically, there's no danger of one OS corrupting another because they exist on separate physical partitions which are hidden from one another.

The fact that both partitions went "bad" at the same time makes me suspect a hardware fault of some sort in the HDD that affected both partitions.


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Joker on 2004-01-16 21:09 ]</font>

Yes, if both boot partitions have failed, then I would also suspect a hardware problem too.
Nestor have you tried using the bootmagic boot floppy or a winxp rescue disk to see if you can see the hardrive partitions ok?

I havent devoted myself as I should, cos in about two hours, I'll be traveling, I have to work and so, will be off this for about one or two weeks. When comming back, will get to it till finding out what is going on.

I have tryed as much as posible, and it doesn't seem to be a hardware related problem. It makes nevertheless total sense what you suspect. If there is something related to hardware, I think it would unfortunately be related to the MOBO, not to the drives.

I have a Seagate app that allows you to check discs and tells you if there is something bad in them.

Thanks for your answers and please, come back in a week or two, I'll be here again, to read posible solutions hopefully.

Thanks to you all
Nestor.

Due to a mistake with my tickets, I am stil at home... Well, I have tryed getting the BIOS back to its original state, nothing happend.

Then I tryed to go back to the original image, using TrueImage, it did work properly, but did not change the problem. Nevertheless, I can be sure now that the C drive is working properly, because it could come back, and did it in 3 minutes, so it's working fine.

I tryed some other rather drastic mesures, like getting into the CHANGEMBR in the Caldera DOS program of XP, and said "S", doing a new MBR, nothing, everything continues as described before.

One exceptions was that when changing the BIOS to its original setting, it came up complaning that the CPU speed did not match the real CPU, which is false, because settings were set to automatic... (?) very strange... It's late... I'm tyred after having tryed all sort of tests for about 5 hours now...

I tryed to load BootMagic rescue disc, but it does not load. I tryed also the Partition Magic rescue discs, but did not work either... This is becoming a serious to me...

My main concern is that I have NO money at all to change anything, and must work to pay my bills, truly frustrating... I hope to solve it soon after comming back from my travel.

Thanks again

terrible it is.
Wish you luck when you're back

Nestor,

On one motherboard (ASUS or ABIT I think), I was having problems where one of the symptoms was that the speed of my CPU was no longer recognized. A quick (though not ultimate) fix was to "re-establish" the CPU speed by changing the "No" flag on the "Reset Configuration Data" in the BIOS and rebooting. If I saw a message to the effect that the ESCD was being updated, I would go back in the BIOS, change the flag back to "Yes" and reboot. This would then allow me a few more sessions. You may have to put in a dummy (low value - please!) CPU speed reading - do the ESCD toggle - then get the right CPU value to show - then toggle - etc. It's sort of like moving a refrigerator by yourself, if you know what I mean. Good luck.

By the way, what motherboard are you using? No fried capacitors are there?

Thanks for the tips, I'll try it when back. I'm leaving in about an hour now.

My MOBO is the P4PE SATA LAN. Cheers