stuck at XP welcome screen (giving up my hope)

Hello everyone, after one week reading the forum and getting nowhere, i thought about writing down my case

I have 2 hard disks: one of the two hosts a dual boot system with two win xp partitions; the other drive is for my data.
A few days ago i changed the letter of a partition on the data drive (reverting it back later), but from that moment i couldn't log on the secondary xp anymore: i'm just stuck at the welcome screen and waiting for something to happen.

I tried everything to fix the problem:
- I tried to recover the xp installation via cd, and it worked, until i rebooted the system!
- used the fixboot and fixmbr commands
- I burnt Paragon rescue cd and made any kind of drive letter change, MBR fix, etcetera....
- Burnt BartPE and looked from there

Now i just don't know what else i could do, i just dont want to format that os and start from scratch.
I thought about moving the faulty partition to a secondary disk drive and try to get the dual boot again, but i'm afraid that i couldn't log on windows again...
Or i could do something with the registry files
system.dat user.dat.
(i wanted to look at the Disk ID in Paragon but i cant click on it.)
Or what else could i do?

If you have any ideas, they are more than welcome...thanks in advance everyone.
Enzo

 

A few questions.
The system drive contains 2 separate XP installations?
Is one on a primary partition and the other on a secondary?
What bootloader are you using?

I ran into something similar on a dualboot XP/98 unit. Both were on primary partitions. A while ago I had to rebuild the drive. The 98 system had to be on the active partition in order to work. After repartitioning, XP refused to boot, stalling much as you described, even though I used an image made from its original partition. What worked on mine was to set the XP partition as active using GParted. After that XP, booted and 98 would not. I then reset 98s primary partition as active from within XP. After that, both worked. Try changing which partition is active, even if it seems wrong or backwards in relation to what you had.

 

yes, on my main hard disk i have 2 XP operating systems...and it's always been perfect together.
The system is booting with the normal boot.ini file; now i can't access to the second one (the not active partition).
i think i could invert the active flag and put it on the second partition, but i'm afraid that i won't access to my main os either, in the end.

Maybe could i delete by hand the registry keys in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices in the second OS, the offline way? does a program exist, to be opened on my first xp OS?

thanks a lot!

 

Just to clarify, you can't boot to the non-active partition or you have no access to it at all? What message is displayed when you try to boot to the non-active partition?
Is the non-active partition flagged as hidden? If yes, was it hidden before? On my system, I had to remove the hidden flag from the inactive partition.

If you use a tool like GParted to make the change from outside of Windows, it will be just as easy to put it back as it was. ON mine, I could make either OS bootable using GParted, but not both of them. In order to make both work, I had to change the active partition using the disk management component in XP before both worked properly.

 

Do not know too much about dual boot but have you checked your boot.ini file to make sure both partitions are present and the boot loader section is correct?

http://www.computerfreetips.com/How_to/how_to_remove_windows.html

 

the second partition os is loading fine until the "logon" screen with the windows logo. Then i just move the mouse around but nothing happens...so i dont think it's about boot.ini. I have edited and fixed it more than once
i think it could be something in the registry and drive IDs in the second partition...or stuff like that

 

Can you describe the change you made? Was the drive letter for either XP system above the letter you changed, either before or after the change? Did you add another drive letter?

 

on the data drive just i inverted the order of 2 partitions; when i found the problem i reverted back...
now i'm trying to semplify: one OS on the first drive, the other one on the second one. Let's see if the disk IDs will be good!

 

Thanks everyone, i installed the os in the second partition, under the letter G:\
Strange thing, even after a new clean installation, i had to search and replace for wrong letters in the registry, much stuff linking to C:\. It must be the default setting for Microsoft, but they should be more flexible with the non C:\ installations.
Cheers,
Enzo