It all started when I was trying to install a new primary disk. The new disk is a Western Digital disk, and comes with "Data Lifeguard Tools". So I took out my current slave IDE disk, and put in the WD in its place with the plan of copying the primary disk to it. So I tried to follow the WD instructions, which said to run the tutorial to do this on a Windows XP system. Well, I kept getting a message that the system didn't have a free IDE slot for the disk, and this other thing from the Data Lifeguard Tools came up and asked me if I wanted to initialize the disk. So I followed that, knowing that I would probably need to go back and run the tutorial thing afterwards. So I let the initialization thing run through partitioning, and part way through copying my dying primary disk to the new disk. My next step was to try to run the Data Lifeguard tutorial thing in safe mode, since it suggested that all other windows programs should not be started up or running. So I started my system in safe mode, and tried to run the tutorial. Well, it errored out, so I figured that it must need something that's only available in normal mode. This is where my problems started. I tried to restart the system in normal mode, and it would only start in safe mode, but it was a working safe mode. So I tried to start it from "last working configuration". Now it starts to boot in safe mode, gets the text safe mode boot messages on the top and bottom of the screen, but stops booting with a graphical screen that just has the Microsoft logo and "Windows XP" on it, no way to login from there. Does anyone have any suggestions on what I should do to try to restore this thing to working mode? I really don't want to re-install, but I wonder if there isn't some way that I can get it to boot again. Thanks. -Roger

wow... kinda hard to follow this one :-/ Did you have a successful install of the OS to your new Hard Drive? and were you able to successfully load and use windows on the new OS before the problems started occuring? Did you leave the old (possibly failing) hard drive attached to your system while installing the new OS? Did you install the new Hard Drive afterwards, and if so is that when your system started crashing? Since it has started crashing have you tried removing the old hard drive from your system? There are too many issues that I think you are trying to work on at the same time here (Install a new HD&OS, trouble shoot and old one & learn some new program while following a manual and chewing gum ;-) and you need to get one system back to a point of stability. I would recommend completely removing the old HD from your system and trying to get your system (new install and HD) stable before doing anything else. A new install may be in order if you feel the original install was corrupted and is therefore what is preventing your from booting into windows. HOpe that Helps! Michael Live, Love & Google!

Michael, Good comments. No, I didn't finish preparing the new disk, I'm trying to boot the old one. It hasn't yet failed to boot (except for now), but I hear disk retries when scanning for viruses, so I decided that the disk was starting to go bad. Right now, I have the new disk unplugged, since I thought that having it connected might be affecting the ability of the system to boot, but disconnecting it didn't help. After a little research, I'm thinking of going the "re-install" route via my Windows XP CD with the old disk, and trying repair options to see if I can retain the data on the disk but just get it booting again. Does that make sense to you? Thanks. -Roger

Okay, I've just tried to do a re-install, and it gets to a point where it says that "setup cannot run in safe mode, restarting...". After that, it comes up in safe mode again, and I get the same setup message. This is a loop, it just does the same thing over and over. It sounds like "re-install" isn't going to work, so I'm going to have to do a complete installation. Any other ideas on what I can do? Thanks. -Roger

sorry, bad terminology on my part I guess. By "re-install" I simply meant installing again (a complete installation in your words). Also I would not attempt to do anything more with the old Hard drive as you risk losing more data. Pull the old drive out of the system and just try to get a new installation going on the new Hard Drive (make sure you have CDROM as the first boot device). Once you have a stable OS on the new HD you can then put the 2nd HD (maybe if it's not too far gone) in as a slave and just copy any data from that to your new, but for now pull the old out and let it sit. Let me know how it goes. Thanks. Live, Love & Google!

just re-read the posts "re-install" must have come from your research as I didn't use it in my previous posts. If you have suspect that your old hard drive is starting to fail, then it's best to do as little as possible with it until you are at a point where you can pull data off it. Trying re-installs, and doing other hard drive activity on the old drive could cause it to completely fail before you recover your data. Installing the OS on a new HD would be my recomendation in this case. If you think that the old drive is still good and that just the OS is corrupted then trying to fix, re-install the OS isn't a bad plan. It's just preference.. some like to re-install, others like to fix. Please note that attempting to "fix" can always have the potential for losing data if you are not confident in what you are doing. There are a whole slew of options for for trying to fix, if you haven't already tried them (not sure in your research/attempts at what you have done): Boot to Safe Mode > CheckDIsk, Defrag, SFC Boot to XP CD -> Recover Console and various tools. etc. but whatever, just let me know, and if you suspect HD failure then just opt for the new install it's safer. Michael Live, Love & Google!

Michael, Okay, so I moved the new disk to the IDE primary master position to install onto it, and now my BIOS is acting weird. It takes some time to come up (the message "loading setup" stays up for a number of seconds, when I didn't used to see it all), but it does show the model number of the new WD disk as the hard disk. The computer boot then stalls again after the BIOS message "Legacy keyboard detected", for quite some time. It didn't use to do that, either. I'd really like to get rid of these 2 new long pauses during boot, but don't know what's happening when they happen. They look like BIOS problems, since they happen before the OS boot is started. The only configuration difference that I can think of (other than the new primary disk *smile*) is that the second disk that I have is now disconnected to protect it during installation. Anyways, at the moment, I'm doing a new Windows XP installation on the new disk. This will be a long road, since I'll have lots of stuff to install and configure, but it probably the most direct way to get to a working system at this point...at least with the new disk. Thanks. -Roger