Windows booting- hangs

[flashfire208]

Hi all
Hope you guys can help me on this because iv tried nearly everything.

So i was cloning a hdd last night and it got to around 80% then my pc just froze up i waited 2 hours (i didnt want to turn it off while doing something like this ) but still nada . So i turned it off and went to bed.

So then this morning when i turned on the pc it first wanted to scan the disk for errors so i skipped it and thought nothing of it , it then goes through post , then loads windows , then shows a light blue screen (the same background as when you log in) with a windows xp logo and mouse pointer on screen (see attached img) then it just sits there , but the mouse is still movable.

I tried to run safe mode ... Same thing .
I tried a repair installation of windows ... Same thing .
I ran chkdsk from the repair console
And it found 1 error ... Still same prob

Im running XP with SP3

Thanks in advance

 

[Grimspoon]

You probaly did this but did you run CHKDSK /R or /F ?

I know I had an issue with my laptop and that fixed it.

Sorry I can't give more helpful advice.

 

[flashfire208]

i ran it with chkdsk /p

Thanks anyway though

 

[flashfire208]

Damn , 79 views and one reply - must have you guys stumped

But i ran chkdsk /r today and .... Same prob

 

[Drake2007]

I would suspect hardware, start troubleshooting RAM. memtest will do this for you. Next could be the HD on its way out.

 

[davemc]

Is the computer booting off the cloned drive? The same cloned drive that did not clone properly?
It's a long shot, but my BIOS simply hops to the next drive when it fails to find a boot sector on the first, and now perhaps the failed clone is the first, so it's trying to boot it.

i.e. Check the bios boot order, make sure it's booting off the clone-source drive.

It sounds like most of the files are there, except for the critical interface ones, like explorer.exe, so it just sits there with no interface.

-guesstheanswer.com-

 

[TheRift]

Damn , 79 views and one reply - must have you guys stumped

This type of XP hang can be due to many different things, so not surprised someone wouldn't have the definitive answer for it. I'd remove all unnecessary hardware and fire it up and see if it works. If you can, take the drives to another machine and do a chkdsk from there.

 

[flashfire208]

Well im booting off the original drive , so i hope its not the problem.
I will remove all unessecary hardware and try again , if the problem persists ill move the HDD to another PC.

Thanks for the help so far

 

[TheRift]

What you could also do is enable the boot log.
You can do this in the boot.ini file if you can get to it. Add "/bootlog" to the Windows option in there.
Or when it starts up, press F8 and select the "Enable Boot Logging" option.
Both with create a log file called "ntbtlog.txt" in the Windows directory. You might be able to tell from that file where it might be hanging up (driver, etc).