My XP partition won't boot all of a sudden

Dfran

I have a dual boot drive with xp pro and vista x64 ult on it. It's been working fine for about 5 months, but now it starts to load the os and freezes up on the blue windows screen before login. The only thing different I did, which I don't think should affect it, is clone the partition to another drive, it was immediately following that though that it stopped working. I tried to boot into safe mode but have not been able to, it goes right to the safe mode, f8, screen for vista.

Is there any way to fix this?
How can I force it go into safe mode for xp?

thanx

**Doctor Feelgood** · Posted: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 08:53:21 Post Subject:

Do you have the drive you cloned from? Can you check if that still works?

I would think it could be a potential suspect, as I know my clones haven't always gone as planned. What app did you use to clone it?

BeerCheeze · Posted: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 10:19:14 Post Subject:

What he said. Sometimes the cloning process goes wrong... and instead of a smart intelligent human being we end up with a George W Bush. Looks like it should work, no reason why it doesn't work right... but it just doesn't.

Laughing

Dfran · Posted: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 19:43:43 Post Subject:

Hellfire · Rated XXX Joined: 05 Aug 2003 Posts: 3473

Not sure since it's a dual boot, but could the master boot record be toast? If that's the case, I think the only possible fix is to boot off the XP disc, and use the repair console. FixMBR I think is the command to fix the master boot record, however be aware that depending on how corrupt it is, it could wipe the partition.

That's only a thought though, and could be WAY off base Razz

BeerCheeze · Posted: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 21:58:37 Post Subject:

I was thinking around the same thing there HF.

Or you could try to load GRUB... but.... I probably wouldn't try that.

Dfran · Posted: Thu, 31 Jan 2008 10:33:14 Post Subject:

edvallie · Posted: Wed, 20 Feb 2008 23:19:37 Post Subject:

Does the Vista partition get recognized when you are booted into XP?

You could try running 'msconfig' in XP and seeing if there are any signs of your Vista Partition in the boot.ini tab. If theres no luck there, I think i'd just install grub from a livecd and manually write the boot entries to where the OS's are located on the harddisks. (Assuming they're not autodetected).

T-shirt · Posted: Thu, 21 Feb 2008 04:13:46 Post Subject:

Ok now you have to reload Vista.
rule of thumb for multi-boot windows load the oldest version first, newest last.
In your case vista actually controlled the boot menu and reloading XP wiped that out.