I have recently installed a new hard drive, which I partitioned and used Norton Ghost to make a copy of my existing boot drive - which appeared to have been done correctly. I have now replaced the original hard drive with the new and XP fails to load correctly. The system gets stuck at the "Please Wait" screen, looping around "Logging off", "Saving your settings", and "Loading your personal settings". My system was setup to log into a user account automatically although it does get as far as skinning the window with the Media Centre skin.

Give this a try, (Free Version) I have used it with no problems. http://www.xxclone.com/iwhatis.htm

"a new hard drive, which I partitioned" Hopefully with more than one partition. Note: The second partition need only be large enough to contain an image of the original bootable drive. Using a Ghost floppy disk make a "Partition to Image" and save it onto the second partition of the new hard drive. Swap the drives and then using the Ghost floppy again use "Image to Partition" to the first partition of the new hard drive. Now, the first partition of the new hard drive will be listed as the C:\ drive. To offer an explanation: I do not know how you used Ghost nor do I know the particulars of your setup but I am guessing that you cloned the bootable drive to the installed (Active) new hard drive and in doing so it creates that partition with an appropriate drive letter at the time of the cloning. So, if your original drive letter was drive C:\ with a single partition on that drive and you cloned it to the new hard drive with only a single partion then that cloned drive letter would be D:\. Windows will look on drive C:\ for the boot files. In this noted scenario there would be no C:\ drive; only a D:\ drive. HTH Bryan

Partitioning before cloning was not nessessary unless you chose to clone the partition and not the whole drive. This is not normally how it's done, usually you clone the whole drive. If you did clone the whole drive, then what ever partition your created before you cloned to the new drive was wiped out, it would not have created a drive D. What version of Ghost are you using?

I've had a similiar problem when using Ghost and then logging on for the first time as a "limited" user. If your user account is not "administrator" equivalent XP may not be able to load the drivers for the new drive. To fix, just boot into safe mode and then log on as administrator. XP should then identify the new drive and load the drivers for it.

If you have a boot cd, boot to recovery console and do a fixmbr at the prompt(this will not involve the partition table)~ Else you could use a Win9x with fdisk and do a fdisk /MBR

Have you tried booting into safe mode? Search Engines Are Your Friends ☺ Morpheus: There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. "The Matrix"