Windows XP Pro Problem

[mharoon]

Hello,

 

On my Windows XP Professional system the hard drive was running out of disk space, and I wanted to upgrade the hard drive. I backed up my drive and restored it on a new drive, but XP won't let me login. Following is how I did it:

 

1. I installed a a new drive as a slave drive on the primary EIDE controller.

2. Partitioned the new drive into two different partitions, formatted them with NTFS and assigned drive letters D and E.

3. Used Retrospect Professional 6.5 to backup my C drive to a file backup on drive E.

4. Created a disaster recovery CD for my backup.

5. Configured the new drive as master, and replaced the old drive with new one.

6. Booted up with disaster recovery CD, and restored the backup from second partition to the first.

 

When XP boots up after restore, it displays a pretty screen with blue background and XP logo (looks like welcome screen), but won't display the login prompt or user names. Following is what I have tried so far:

 

1. CTRL+ALT+DEL twice, hoping it would display login prompt

2. Restarted computer (hard reboot)

3. Restored the backup to D drive without disaster recovery

4. FIXMBR command from XP recovery console.

5. Anything else I could think of at the moment.

 

Every time XP boots to this logo screen, but won't allow me to login.

 

I would really appreciate it if anyone has any information on how to resolve this situation. I have replaced new drive with the old one and am up and running, but won't be for long since space is running out on this drive fast!

 

TIA.

[jelenko]

If XP is recognizing the first partition of the new drive as "D", that's the problem.

The partition you restore to must have the same drive letter as the original [usually C].

When you booted with the Disaster Recovery CD, do you remember what drive letters were of the two partitions?

 

Did you use the utility in the DR CD to format the partition first? If you did and the second partition was still recognized as "E", then the first one should have been assigned C - in which case it should have worked.

 

An alternative approach that will work for sure is to create a CD/DVD backup of your old drive. Then, you can use the utilities in the DR CD to delete all the partitions on the new drive, create and format a new partition. [make sure the old one is NOT in the PC when you do disaster recovery - otherwise, it will assign the old one drive letter C]

 

HTH

[mharoon]

Thank you for your response. XP is recognizing the first partition of the new drive as 'C'. When I booted with the diaster recovery CD, XP automatically assigned drive letters C and D to the two partitions on the new drive. When I used DR, I had removed the old drive from my computer. Also I had stored the backup files on the second partition of the new drive, which was recognized by XP as drive D at the time of DR. I did not have to format or recreate partitions on the new drive at the time of DR.