Xp Pro less than a week old and I've trashed my install?

I loaded up XP Pro for the first time and updated to SP1 with critical updates. Everything was fine until I wanted to copy my old stuff from the old hard drive to the new one with XP. I hooked up my old drive as the only device on the 2nd IDE channel. Well, unlike Win98, XP appears to have a problem with doing this w/o uninstalling your IDE devices first.

I was able to get XP to boot by replacing the original IDE config. I then uninstalled the DVD-ROM/Burner but XP would still not boot... "XP has detected a change in your hardware ". No matter what I choose, XP would just reboot and reboot from this menu. I cleared CMOS and uttered some choice words and finally got XP to boot with a HD on the 2nd IDE. It probably booted out of fear from all my obscenities.

Well later I forgot and made the same mistake. After countless attempts I finally got XP to boot normally with correct devices listed. All was well until this morning. Now I just get the menu saying "something has changed - how do want to handle this? ". And now it just keeps rebooting no matter what I do. I can only get into Safe Mode.

Can anyone help me with this?

Would the thing below help?

Turn off auto restart -
Control Panel/System/Advanced/Startup and recovery
uncheck auto restart to prevent an endless loop of boots when you are having trouble

 

Hello Chiles,

Have you done the XP activation yet?

These are the kind of symptoms I've read about if after activation, a great deal of the hardware is changed. Haven't read about anyone trying to add/switch hardware before activation so don't know what XP's response would be if any. Maybe this is it?

If you have, perhaps you have to re-activate it, but in reading about WPA, what you did should not have triggered this response, one hardware device change shouldn't have done this.

Regards - Charles

 

From what people have told me, slaving a hard drive in WinXP is no biggie and people do it all the time. I went into Safe Mode and turned off the Reboot on Error option in the Control Panel and when I rebooted I saw this:

C0000221 Unknown Hard Error
\systemroot\system32\ntdll.dll

What caused this? I don't have the faintest. I reghosted back to an image I made right after updating to SP1 + critical updates. I rebooted and had the exact same error. I then went back to an image I took right after installing XP and everything was back to normal.

So I'm left here thinking what the heck do I do? Install SP1, install critical updates, or install nothing? I'm getting conflicting advice on this.

It just seems so weird. You hear, "XP is so much more robust and fault tolerant than Win98 ". I messed with my machine constantly and have had nothing but incredible success with Win98SE. I mess with XP for a week and I've trashed it. I guess I'm just a little shell-shocked at this point.

Thanks for the reply, Charles. You aren't by chance the Charles V. from the Rage3d.com forums?

 

Hi chiles,

Still curious as to whether you activated XP yet (WPA).

I would install SP1, simply because subsequent updates do and will depend on it being installed. Just keep the option to uninstall it in the future which SP1 gives you.

As for the critical updates, pick and choose and give some time between them with Sysytem Restore points (don't think you have to use the image backup for this) before each. Don't know if you have been following the threads about XP updates here and in the Security/Virus section; they are worth reading through. They have "updates" in the title plus the one about "version 5-29 811493 ".

No, I am not the person your referring to.

Regards - Charles

 

Question...

Is your old hard drive 'bootable'? XP does not like two bootable hard drives installed. Other versions of Windows were a little more forgiving. If this is the case... use a partition utility (like Partition Magic) to hide the boot partition on the old hard drive. Just a thought. HTH

B

 

Yes I've activated XP. And yeah the old drive was bootable (Win98SE). I eventually got the data off by slaving the old drive to the new one. The problem stems from the state of XP after I messed around with my IDE devices.

And I know about Q811493. Thankfully, it's a sticky over at amdforums.com.

Eventually I'll be setting up a RAID array for XP - you can be sure that I "m going to be installing from scratch on that one.