Perfect system, now won't reboot after attaching external US

[nikemen]

So, any of you who have followed my other thread, when I had a hard drive fail. That seems to have been resolved, managed to get it going.

Now, my trust T41 won't boot fully.

I get to windows, the startup, the progresss bar, welcome to XP pro, then the blue screen and the Windows XP in small print and EXPECT to get the differant user logins, but it just HANGS there never going any further.

So, what was I doing just before this happened, I was trying to MOUNT an external USB drive, the 60 GB drive that CRASHED out of my T42.

I could not for the life of me get it to mount, but it WOULD show up in the Disk Management application. That is WHERE I was, seeing the various drives, the C:/ that I had, the External which was showing up just as 51GB 51GB FREE, strange and 5.6GB IBM PREDESKTOP.

I kept trying to MOUNT this drive, or OPEN this drive, the external one, but no luck.

It kept saying Drive E:/, NOT ACCESSABLE.

I would try Mount, no go, OPEN no go.

I couldn't really even get properties from the external drive.

At one poing, the DISK MANAGEMENT application gave me an error, and Crashed, had to be ENDED to quit.

I walked away, and tried working on the EXTERNAL USB drive, the dead disk on another computer. A MAC incidentally that mounted it okay and I was able to extract data.

But, when I came back to my Trusty T41, it was sitting there at the Blue Screen with the Windows XP JUST before showing the USER logins.

So, I hard rebooted it, and it started up, started up to the XP, progress bar, to the blue screen and then boom, same thing HANG.

Any thoughts on getting it past this point? Is there a DOS login, EXE that I can access from the BIOS, or pre windows, to try to startup that way.?

Have I corrupted some critical startup file?

Any thoughts on getting past this?

[GomJabbar]

Read what jdhurst posted in this thread. It may be the issue you are experiencing. http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=18874

[nikemen]

are you talking about boot order? Meaning, looking for FDD HDD0 or HDD1?

I seem to be booting fine, getitng to winxp, etc, but not to logins?

I guess I could try booting into safe mode. Haven't tried that.
any other thoughts people?

[GomJabbar]

No. I was talking about his reference to the same copy of Windows on two hard drives.

[nikemen]

no, I don't think this is the same copy of windows problem, don't know why it just stalls at the blue windows startup screen.

Can't get it to get past it, even on SAFE MODE