WinXP boots into a blank blue screen

[McReady]

ladies and gentlemen,

after some fiddling with partitions on my r51 winXP pro will not boot correctly anymore. not even safe mode. zounds! just what i needed right now.

i've reset all partitions as they were before, being a c: with windows, d: with program files, e: with just data. to my knowledge, everything seems to be as before i started to create/move/delete partitions on it.

problem is: winXP boots into a blank blue screen which looks just like the screen that's presented when booting is finished and you may choose your user profile. in the middle of the screen there is a tiny windows logo, that's all. there seems to be no more disk activity after that.

i still have that recovery partition and recovery cds made with rapid restore, but i'd like to rekindle that old installation very much.

the last thing i did when winxp did correctly boot, was to reset a drive letter after hiding a partition. all these changes have been made undone so far.

your help is very much appreciated!!
mcready

[Bob Collins]

Not sure if this will help, but I had similar after one of the Microsoft updates. The boot process took about 30 minutes until the logon screen or user selector appeared.

Otherwise I would assume maybe your swap file location has changed due to relabeling your partitions? Are you sure you relabeled them correctly?

Perhaps pressing F8 at boot and selecting last good boot.....

[McReady]

really not my weekend.

thanks for the reply, but i fear all is lost now. i don't know the cause of the faulty boot behaviour. as far as i could tell drives were named correctly, but obviously some important data was not found. guess i should have left it standing for about 30 minutes as you mentioned and waited for further life signs of windows.

i tried to backup the contents of the partitions with ibm rescue and recovery. i managed to get the files of c: onto my usb drive and thought partitions d: and e: would be safe when executing a restore operation with ibm rescue and recovery. ibm rescue and recovery is by the way one of the most user-hostile software tools i've come across.

instead of clearing out just c: it went on and deleted all partitions on the laptop. now the r51 is hung in a loop of doing a factory restore (takes about 2 hours) and rebooting into ibm rescue and recovery, prompting me to do a - factory restore.

at such a point i normally wake up. guess it's not a nightmare though.

mcready

[sugo]

Did you set C: as active partition?

[McReady]

active was set, yes. i am really vexed. i've done this kind of partitioning countless times.

the laptop has gone through one successfull run of factory restore now and i have winXP up again. i lost a lot of my work/data though. only some of it was able to make its way onto my new usb drive. that'll teach me being overconfident. always backup everything before doing that computer scientist stuff.

now i need to reinstall and update and configure quite a bit and try to get my norton antivirus subscription back from symantec.

mcready