Hi, I'm stuck with Windows XP not loading past the logo screen, where it says "Windows is Loading” and is about to show user profiles. It never gets to the point where user profiles appear. The mouse cursor is present and I can move it around the screen just fine. Here's what I did before the problem started occurring: 1) Initially I had only one drive installed in my system ("drive A") 2) I burned a ghost image of the entire drive A on a DVD, and continued using drive A for a few weeks. 3) I purchased a new drive ("drive B"). 4) I installed drive B into my PC as master, and made drive A a slave. 5) I copied the previously backed up image of drive A (former master, now slave) from the ghost dvd onto drive B, using standard Ghost procedures. 6) I booted my machine with B as master and A as slave. 7) The PC booted fine, and Windows XP loaded fine. 8) I copied certain files from drive A to Drive B (which was the only reason why I left A installed as a slave drive) 9) I powered the PC off, disconnected slave drive A, and attempted to boot the machine with only drive B this time (remember that drive B is now master, contains the exact image of former master drive A, and some files copied from A). 10) This is where the above described problem started. 11) Whenever I try connecting drive A as a slave and attempt to boot, everything works fine. I had some troubles with multiple harddrives before, when I had Linux and Windows on a single computer. However, I'm not quite familiar with what boot sector is, where it resides in the system (whether it's on the hard drive, or somewhere in flash or wherever), and how Windowx deals with it especially when multiple drives are involved. I would appreciate if you identified the problem, and perhaps referred me to some online sources explaining what causes it and how it can be fixed; and perhaps tell me how to fix the problem right away. Thank you for your assistance, V N

If you are about to the user profile screen, you are past the boot sector. Probably have a corrupt Windows file or something. Boot up with the XP cd in and do a repair install when just hard drive b in the machine. Sounds to me like when you can't boot up the first drive the bios is set up to boot from a second hard drive. Thus when you put in the hard drive a you are really booting from that rather than hard drive b. Might be way off base but that is what I would think first.

It sounds like you've gotten a corrupt XP file somewhere. For best results, I would recommend that you do a repair installation of Windows XP. A repair installation will not cause data loss, and it's fairly quick. Just pop the XP CD in, let the CD load the necessary files, then at the first screen, press ENTER. Agree to the license agreement (F8), then Setup should show the installed XP on the screen. There should be a R option. Press R and it will automatically repair your installation. When the repair process is complete, be sure to have a firewall enabled (use the XP one) and quickly download updates such as SP2 and get anti-virus protection (if you don't already have it) in order not to get hit by the Blaster and Sasser viruses (which are known to crash newly installed XP systems without SP2). G'luck! Post back on how the repair went! :)