Had a HDD that boots into XP Home on a Dell P4 tower.  Attached a cooling fan to the HDD. 

XP would no longer boot.  Removed the fan and XP still does not boot.

Tried cloning in three different earlier Ghost 2003 images of the XP Home OS partition but none of them boot.  Tried same Ghost images on a brand new hard drive but same problem.

(XP stalls early in the boot process on the mostly blue screen that says <Microsoft Windows XP> at the right of the screen.)


Would be highly interested to have a way to get these Ghost images to work.  Also interested to understand why they do not work...

Have had consistently good results reinstalling Ghost images of OS partitions for a few years.

Thanks very much for your help.

contrast256


Details below:

Hardware is
·      Dell Dimension 4550, Pentium 4
·      Maxtor 300 GB hard drive (drive 0)
·      Seagate 500 GB hard drive (drive 1), the drive where the XP Home images don’t work

Partitions on the 500 GB hard drive are
·      NTFS for the XP Home operating system and apps
·      FAT 32 for Ghost image files
·      NTFS for data

Had made periodic backups of the OS partition using Ghost 2003, booting from an FDD.


Installed a cooling fan attached directly to the 500 GB hard drive.

Computer would no longer boot from the XP Home partition on drive 1.

Removed the fan.  Still would not boot.  Kept the fan removed.


Cloned the most recent Ghost 2003 image of the XP operating system partition back onto its usual physical partition on the drive.  Still would not boot.

Tried the other two older images of the XP OS partition on the drive and they did not work either.

(Computer continues to boot fine from the 300 GB hard drive (drive 0 above), using its Windows 2000 Pro OS.)


Replaced the 500 GB drive with a brand new 500 GB drive from Seagate.

Partitioned and formatted the new hard drive using the XP Home install CD.

Tried cloning the same Ghost images onto the new 500 GB drive, but it still doesn’t boot into XP.

The error is: XP stalls early in the boot process on the mostly blue screen that says <Microsoft Windows XP> on the right side of the screen.

<Is that the light blue screen that usually says, "Windows is starting up"? But your screen doesn't have this message.>

Brian,

Thanks for your question.

No, it's a different screen.

The five-step boot sequence seen here for the _new install_ of XP Home am working on are:

1 - on a black background: the words “Microsoft Windows XP”
three blue beads move across the center of the screen repeatedly from left to right
a copyright notice

2 - a totally dark screen

3 - same dark screen with the pointer in the center

4 - a plain blue screen with the only the word “Welcome” and nothing else

5 - the normal XP desktop screen with icons and the Start button in lower left


When booting from a _Ghost 2003 clone_ of the same Windows XP Home Edition, the sequence is:

1, 2, and 3 are same as above

4 - a screen with a dark blue band across the top, another dark blue band across the bottom, the rest of the screen is light blue
the four-color flag logo and the words “Microsoft Windows XP” in the middle of the screen
and nothing else

The Ghost image file stalls on that 4th screen.