Windows won't load past login screen

scottscott Medina, Ohio Icrontian
edited February 2004 in Science & Tech
Well after I cloned my system over to my rebuilt raid array every thing seemed fine until I unplugged the original drive. The array posts then the black XP screen then the Blue XP screen and it hangs there before the the username login box appears.
here is what I did..... WD80 had OS on it and was drive C & D I cloned both partitions over to the array one at a time. I then changed boot priority to the array and it booted up fine. It still shows the 80 as C & D and the array as G&H and shows G as the system disk. It also shows the page file on C

It runs fine this way as long as the wd80 is plugged in , If I unplug the molex it will not load past the logon screen.

OS is XP Pro

what am I missing here ?

Comments

  • EnverexEnverex Worcester, UK Icrontian
    edited January 2004
    You may want to specify the other drive as the PageFile drive and try again, as as you just mentioned, it is still using that WD drive for the pagefile.

    But I have a feeling this is something to do with drive letters, due to the way it is treating it there.
  • scottscott Medina, Ohio Icrontian
    edited January 2004
    Well actually I did do that ( forgot to mention it ) I even tried to highlight the c drive and say "No page file" but it will not accept that, and now lists two drives with page file. I even tried a cmos reset.

    any ideas ?
  • EnverexEnverex Worcester, UK Icrontian
    edited January 2004
    Did you actually click "Set" after setting it to "No Page File"?
  • gtghmgtghm New
    edited January 2004
    Have to check to see if the NTLDR file (or what ever its called) is on the C partition/old sytem partition. For what ever reason XP is pretty insistant on residing on the C drive. My guess is that there is boot information on the C drive that the OS has to have asscess to, and when you disconnect that 80 drive xp freeks out. You could try going into a program like partiton magic and hiding the old system partition, then rename the new system partiton, which I see is "G:" if I read your pic's right, to C: that might do the trick.
    I would also change your page file to the current system drive before you make the drive letter changes... Actually I would leave the page file on the same drive/partition as the OS, in XP there is no difference in performance by putting the page file on a different drive/partition. In some cases this can even have an adverse affect on performance according to all of the info I have read.

    "g"
  • Straight_ManStraight_Man Geeky, in my own way Naples, FL Icrontian
    edited January 2004
    gtghm wrote:
    Have to check to see if the NTLDR file (or what ever its called) is on the C partition/old sytem partition. For what ever reason XP is pretty insistant on residing on the C drive. My guess is that there is boot information on the C drive that the OS has to have asscess to, and when you disconnect that 80 drive xp freeks out. You could try going into a program like partiton magic and hiding the old system partition, then rename the new system partiton, which I see is "G:" if I read your pic's right, to C: that might do the trick.
    I would also change your page file to the current system drive before you make the drive letter changes... Actually I would leave the page file on the same drive/partition as the OS, in XP there is no difference in performance by putting the page file on a different drive/partition. In some cases this can even have an adverse affect on performance according to all of the info I have read.

    "g"

    True, unless XP is told not to use the first drive BIOS offers it, it sticks NTLDR on first drive, in boot record or in a set place by HD physical position on drive pointed to by boot record. Clone to drive with diffeerent physical media params, clone fails that way. Underside of DRM and minimal boot record space on drives NT and XP were designed to be compatible with.... NT did this too, 2000 also to a degree....

    John.
  • scottscott Medina, Ohio Icrontian
    edited January 2004
    Boy do I feel like a dope. I guess i did not click the "set" button. doooo :banghead: I did now ! and the pagefile is gone from the 80. It still would not boot without the 80. I will try hidding it and re assigning now.
  • EnverexEnverex Worcester, UK Icrontian
    edited January 2004
    Ageek wrote:
    True, unless XP is told not to use the first drive BIOS offers it, it sticks NTLDR on first drive, in boot record or in a set place by HD physical position on drive pointed to by boot record. Clone to drive with diffeerent physical media params, clone fails that way. Underside of DRM and minimal boot record space on drives NT and XP were designed to be compatible with.... NT did this too, 2000 also to a degree....

    John.

    Doesn't matter, he gets way past that point anyway. If NTLDR wasn't there then you would get a message and it wouldn't boot at all, where as his machine is booting up will the point before the login screen appears.
  • scottscott Medina, Ohio Icrontian
    edited January 2004
    That did it !!! :clap::clap:

    Afew things look kind of funny...I lost my wallpaper.. But it booted ! I will do some diagnostics to see if its ok

    Thanks !!!!!
  • scottscott Medina, Ohio Icrontian
    edited January 2004
    Well everything seems to work but it seemed to be running sluggish. Then I remembered i told windows that there was no page file on C. so I recreated one , and it seems to be running fine now ....but, my harddrive activity light is staying on ??

    Scott
  • Straight_ManStraight_Man Geeky, in my own way Naples, FL Icrontian
    edited January 2004
    Maybe defrag the HD???? Hds that have to hunt all over HD for file pieces adn sets of files that programs need to start up and run tend to get lights on a lot....

    XP's defragger, if run many times, will try to group files belonging to one program together. The defragger can read the journals for files that are accessed real close together, and organize files based on that. files for one program that is not a service thus can get very well grouped, so HD only has to read, and not read and seek and read and seek many times to find parts of program or files. this kind of thing has a cumulative effect in tuning load times, drive access times, etc.

    BUT if you load many large files, then the HD might be rading whole program sets in one go if the drive is well defragged. Cloners do not defrag this way. So try defragging, maybe 3X, to start.

    OH, XP can defrag its swap file also, earlier windows do not do this so well. SO, if you made a swap file when drive was fragmented, then you might have unwittingly made a nice prefragged swap file.... THEN, HD can be hunting for places to put stuff that windows wants to swap to swap file.

    John.
  • EnverexEnverex Worcester, UK Icrontian
    edited January 2004
    Regardless of the drive being fragmented, it still shouldn't be reading or writing while idle unless something is doing it specifically.

    Do you have the "Indexing" service running? As it is most likely that.
  • LawnMMLawnMM Colorado
    edited January 2004
    So what did you do to eventually fix the problem? I'm having the same problem with my secondary system. It won't boot unless I have my old 80gig drive plugged into it.

    You told windows not to use it for the swap file? Is that what did it for you?
  • gtghmgtghm New
    edited January 2004
    It looks like he changed the drive letter on his new drive, with the OS on it, to C:
  • TheBaronTheBaron Austin, TX
    edited January 2004
    yeah one of my friends had a similar problem with a computer he had built.

    his partition scheme was set-up
    80 gigs - empty
    80 gigs - left over files from previous install, dubbed C:

    apparently on his old comp, there was no problem with having windows on D:, but as it didn't seem to want to get past the "copy files off cd then reboot" stage of the windows install, i figured what the hey. popped the drive in my machine, moved the files to the front, made it one BIG partition, and viola, windows installed just peachy.

    i seem to recall reading somewhere that windows wants to be in C:, just two more instances to add some real world backing to that claim
  • scottscott Medina, Ohio Icrontian
    edited January 2004
    Yes I am pretty sure that it was drive letter association that was preventing it from loading.The swap file issue seemed to clear up the "sluggishness"

    So I plugged the 80 back in and the hdd activity light went out. ?? in the screen shot below you will notice that the 80 (nonsystem) drive has taken the Disk 0 priority and moved the array to Disk one. Does this mean anything ?

    I unplugged the 80 again and the array returns to Disk 0 and the hdd light came back on. It is definetley looking for something.

    here is my next thought. Should I try to clone again ? but this time the array will be properly associated as "C"
  • scottscott Medina, Ohio Icrontian
    edited January 2004
    Well the re cloneing did not work...same deal. with 80 unplugged hdd light on continuiously.

    Next idea

    Ghost C off the 80 onto a DVD and make a recovery diskette.
    Wipe C on the array disconnect the 80 and reboot with the recovery diskette and load C via the DVD.

    any thoughts ? I will not attempt this until I get some feedback or until tomorrow...whichever comes first.

    I really appreciate everyones help.

    Thanks

    Scott
  • MichielMichiel
    edited February 2004
    Hi,

    I've got the same problem in XP.
    Created an extra partition before the original C: partition and deleted it again.
    Shove up the original partition back to the beginning of the disk and now it
    only shows the blue XP screen.
    I'm pretty sure it's a problem with the drive letter since the 'old' C: drive
    came up as G: with the new partition in front of it. I didn't change it when I
    removed the 'new' partition. I guess it still G: now.
    So, question is, how to make it C: again without having to install XP on a second partition again? Is there a file to hack on the partition?

    Thanks a lot in advance

    Michiel
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