Windows XP hangs and won't boot!!

[GeekLady]

I removed my 2nd hard drive from my computer and rebooted the computer. I then got a list of errors (such as ntoskrnl.exe missing or corrupt, and many more... ) which I fixed one by one in DOS and rebooted after each fix. Now when I try to boot, I get as far as the Windows XP logo screen with the windows "flag" and 4 colors and the blue "progress bar" underneath (the one where the blue bars move from left to right) and then it just hangs indefinitely. I have to manually turn the power off and turn the machine back on.

I can boot in SAFE MODE no problem. When it is loading the drivers, it stops at "agp440.sys"

In safe mode, I disabled the display driver and rebooted. Same problem. No change. Still hangs.

I ran diagnostic tests on all my hardware and everything passed.

I went back and edited the boot.ini file with "/sos" to see where the problem might be.

I got a blue screen with two navy bars top and bottom and medium blue in middle in which the following text is printed:

"Microsoft Windows Version 5.1 (Build 2600: Service Pack 2)
1 System Processor [1024 MB Memory] Multiprocessor Kernel"

And that's it... it just HANGS there....

I've been trying to fix this for the last 7 hours and I'm at wits end. Anybody have any idea what's happening and how I can fix this?

Thanks very much!

 

[thegorx]

well you said you removed a drive, so I'll go

Jumpers for $200 Alex

 

[GeekLady]

LOL Gorx... actually what I ended up doing was after spending an entire day trying different fixes, including chkdsk /r and even running my restore image program from DOS, nothing worked so I ended up disconnecting the C: drive and connecting a spare hard drive to the Master on which I did a fresh install of XP. Then I reconnected the corrupted "C:" drive as Slave and ran the restore program from the "Master" drive in Windows (vs the DOS CD) and then switched the C: drive back to Master, rebooted and everything was back to normal. I should've just done that in the first place instead of compounding the problem. You fix one thing, it screws up another and you can go on like this ad infinitum. Who needs the headache?

So yeah, jumpers had something to do with it - but they weren't faulty. Just needed to do a little switcheroo. All I can think of is that when I goofed with the power plug, Windows went temporarily insane, got confused and some of the startup files got corrupted. Now if Windows was smart, it would just abort everything as soon as it encountered a problem, not save the files it just overwrote and exit bootup w/ error message. And then when I switched the plugs it would see that everything's fine now and boot normally. But noooooo.....

Unfortunately that imaging program installed something into my 1st "hidden" partition and now everytime I boot, it runs that little program which prompts me how I want to boot. PITA. Can't seem to be able to find it on the disk tho'.. so I can uninstall it. As a matter of fact, the partition was hidden (no drive letter assigned to it) prior to running the pgm and even if I unassign the drive letter, it keeps re-assigning it everytime I boot. Anybody used BootIT NG and know how to get rid of this? The boot.ini file shows only the C: drive as the default and only partition to boot from but this pgm seems to override the defaults and always run itself on boot.