RE: Seems to boot but cannot logon

From: Andrew E (eckrichco_at_msn.com)
Date: 06/25/04 

Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2004 08:47:43 -0700

 Useing the "install/repair" option only looses data on complete reinstall with
 formatting the hd,repair old installation only wipes out updates and hotfixes,
 no other loss.Youre problem is with a new board you can transfer the hd
 over,but upon start-up you'll need to boot to xp cd,install xp,new copy,delete
 existing partition (xp),create one,then let xp format and install.Thiers no way
 around it with a new board,xp,hd has to be reconfigured to the board.The
 WD utility wont work in xp for copying hd to hd,use XCOPY in xp.

> Recently I purchased a new mb, processor and case. As I
> have a lot of data and applications installed, I thought
> about simply moving my 100 GB hard drive to the new system
> and rebooting. Then I read about doing an in place
> upgrade using the Install / Repair option via the XP
> installation disk. I also read horror stories about
> possibly loosing all your data and ending up having to
> reinstall Windows XP. As my daughter's computer also has a
> 100 GB hard drive, my new "great" idea was to make a
> backup of her system's hard drive, make a mirror image of
> my old system's hard drive to her hard drive, and finally
> use this mirror image as the "guinea pig" to do the in
> place upgrade. Both the drive are 100 GB Western
> Digital's, the only difference is mine has the 8 meg cache
> and mine was formatted as a FAT32 file system. When I
> used Western Digital's Data LifeGuard and attempted to
> make a copy, the utility repeatedly caused my system to
> reboot once it got to the copy step. I "fixed" this
> problem by converting my 100 GB drive to the NTFS file
> system. But after the copy seemed to execute successfully
> the mirror image was not bootable. Finally I used an
> option called something like 'make copy drive the new boot
> disk' and this not only caused the utility to fail but
> also left my good old hard drive unusable. That is, it
> seems to boot and I get the welcome screen, but there is
> no users to select and therefore I cannot log on. I've
> tried booting to safe mode, last known usable
> configuration, and even a bootable windows floppy but
> nothing seems to work. Since I was so concerned about
> booting from the Windows XP installation disk in the first
> place, from all the problems people seem to have, I am
> really concerned about using the Repair console (there are
> plenty of posts here that say that it left there system
> unusable and had to rebuild from scratch). I also read
> something about a messed up MBR, could this be the problem
> and if so I do I fix it? HELP
>