Operating System Not Detected by Setup CD, windows issues!

[hitokiri]

I had previously posted regarding an issue which caused my WinXP install to malfunction, which stated:

After doing a windows update for WinXP, my system will not go into windows. With a restart it reported immediately that windows did not properly reboot last time, however it did. When selecting an option to start the system (normal, safe mode, safe mode with networking, etc) it will reboot instead.

It happens when trying normal, last known good configuration and all safe mode reboots. I was also running Spybot Search and Destroy, and it caused a failure in one of the installs (was away from the system for awhile, and came back to see it failed. The one that failed had to do with a .NET patch/fix).

Any idea what the issue is and how I can fix it? I dual boot and im on another OS install to write this.

Not knowing what it could be, I tried to do a windows repair install. But upon booting with the windows install cd, there appears to be another problem. During the step where it should be detecting any existing OS's, it did not detect my current WinXP install. Because of this, the option to repair install the current OS is not available.

Since that did not work, I decided to try and reset my registry back to the way it was by backing up the current default, sam, software, security, and system files in C:\windows\system32\config and replacing them with the files in C:\windows\repair.

After that, I tried to reboot and it either caused a corrupted file issue, or it gave the same issue again; which was that it simply rebooted if a windows boot option was selected instead of going into windows.

Any ideas on what I could do to fix this? Or a way to get windows detected so that I could try a windows repair install?

Also, another thing that happens is that if I have the boot cd in my drive, it will go to the D:\ WinXP install instead of attempting to go to the C:\WinXP install, even though in the BIOS, I have it set for C:\ to have higher priority. Maybe worth mentioning is that I have the C:\ using a RAID 1, where it uses the nvidia onboard raid.

However, if the setup cd is NOT in the drive and the BIOS settings remain, it will attempt to go to the C:\ install, but as stated above, there is an issue which causes it to reboot insted of going into windows.

Thank you for any and all suggestions.

- hito

 

[convexion]

When you say repair install are you referring to the recovery console? If not, you may need to go into the console and repair your bootcfg which has caused problems like this in the past for me.

Had the exact same thing happen to me after I overclocked some memory too far but fixing the bootcfg took care of it. If you weren't overclocking anything or changing any physical settings it could be that your hard drive is failing you.

Have you ever used PartitionMagic on this hard drive? That could be another cause, especially if you split the drive and then later rejoin. Sometimes the drive letter gets screwed up even if it shows up correctly in Windows. Don't ask me how I know.