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Author Topic: Somewhat of a critical problem  (Read 562 times)

Offline OOZ662

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Somewhat of a critical problem
« on: August 24, 2009, 10:05:39 PM »
My current Windows install kicked the bucket and won't get through the loading bar after freezing sometime today. Happens every year or so, no problem. Start her in Safe Mode, copy my desktop (the only thing to salvage on C:\), put my streamlined XP Home CD in and reboot. Setup stalls indefinetly at "Setup is starting Windows." Same for my stock CD. I've run a bunch of diagnostics and CPU, RAM, and a surface scan of the hard disk check out OK.

So, the only way I can get a form of Windows XP running is via Safe Mode. Help?

P.S. If you'd like my DxDiag, do a forum search for "dxdiag" limited to my username. You'll get a GoogleDocs link to an up-to-date version. I can't link to it from my iPhone.
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A Rook who first flew 09/26/03 at the age of 13, has been a GL in 10+ Scenarios, and was two-time Points and First Annual 68KO Cup winner of the AH Extreme Air Racing League.

Offline gyrene81

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Re: Somewhat of a critical problem
« Reply #1 on: August 24, 2009, 10:30:41 PM »
I'm assuming you did a full erase of the C:\ partition then formatted before you started reinstalling?

Also if you're running SATA drives in full SATA mode in the bios, you're gonna need the SATA drivers that mobo uses.
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jarhed  
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day...
Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life. - Terry Pratchett

Offline OOZ662

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Re: Somewhat of a critical problem
« Reply #2 on: August 24, 2009, 10:46:42 PM »
The SATA is mimicking IDE through BIOS. I haven't gotten to format C:\ since I generally let the Wondows installer do it, but the installer fails to load.
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A Rook who first flew 09/26/03 at the age of 13, has been a GL in 10+ Scenarios, and was two-time Points and First Annual 68KO Cup winner of the AH Extreme Air Racing League.

Offline gyrene81

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Re: Somewhat of a critical problem
« Reply #3 on: August 24, 2009, 11:08:52 PM »
Very odd...bad laser pickup on the CD drive maybe?

Wait...stalling at setup is starting windows...it's past detection mode at that point and now it's going through the process of detecting previous installs of windows...

Go grab a partition manager program...I've tried BootIt by Terabyte...Easeus Partition Master Home Edition...kill the partitions on that drive...then try your setup disks...uh...you do have another computer to make a bootable cd from don't you?
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jarhed  
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day...
Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life. - Terry Pratchett

Offline OOZ662

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Re: Somewhat of a critical problem
« Reply #4 on: August 24, 2009, 11:16:34 PM »
I have a very specific BootCD that I ought not name here full of every tool I need. I'm running a deeper surface scan at the moment and will format what I can next.
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A Rook who first flew 09/26/03 at the age of 13, has been a GL in 10+ Scenarios, and was two-time Points and First Annual 68KO Cup winner of the AH Extreme Air Racing League.

Offline OOZ662

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Re: Somewhat of a critical problem
« Reply #5 on: August 25, 2009, 02:09:52 PM »
Well, that irritates me. My setup looks like this:

C:\ on SATA called disk 2, 15GB NTFS, OS and replaceable files only
D:\ on SATA disk 2 extended partition, stores all "everyday" data. has an error in PartitionMagic about "crossing the 1024 cylendar boundary and not being an ExtendedX partition." Since this has been resized before, I focused on fixing it and rewrote the Master Boot and partition tables several times.
F:\ on IDE called disk 1. Video and movie storage only. One big NTFS partition.

Remove power to F:\ and everything works. Yup...
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A Rook who first flew 09/26/03 at the age of 13, has been a GL in 10+ Scenarios, and was two-time Points and First Annual 68KO Cup winner of the AH Extreme Air Racing League.

Offline gyrene81

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Re: Somewhat of a critical problem
« Reply #6 on: August 25, 2009, 02:29:20 PM »
Wow...now that sounds like an old issue the original SATA boards had...IDE and SATA wouldn't work together.

So...any way to make C:\ be disk1 in that bios?
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jarhed  
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day...
Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life. - Terry Pratchett

Offline OOZ662

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Re: Somewhat of a critical problem
« Reply #7 on: August 25, 2009, 03:38:51 PM »
Nope, SATA always follows IDE on this board. I suppose I could if I masked SATA as the primary IDE channel, but that doesn't sound like fun.

I believe it has to do with Acronis copying all the boot stuff (boot.ini, ntldr, msdos.sys, io.sys, config.sys, and autoexec.bat) over to F:\ for no reason at all. I've been able to install XP many times in the past with both disks running.
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A Rook who first flew 09/26/03 at the age of 13, has been a GL in 10+ Scenarios, and was two-time Points and First Annual 68KO Cup winner of the AH Extreme Air Racing League.
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