Boot ends in WinXP (Home Edition) logo but with no user logon logos?

I have a DELL Inspiron 8200 with support for a modular bay (plug in) disk in addition to the regular harddisk. Both my harddisk and my plug-in disk are 40GB and I have used the plug-in disk as backup by regularly cloning the harddisk over to the plug-in disk (The program to do this is Horton Utilities Ghost)

Every time I have verified the possibility to boot from the backup this has worked perfectly, and I have been able to clone back to the harddisk a few times ehwn this was neccessary.

Recently I had a major crash on my harddisk, so now I wanted to operate from the plug-in disk instead. But when I boot now I end up with the traditional window for user logon, only that there is no user logon icons in that window, only the "standard" icon for Windows XP Home edition. I can move the mouse pointer around. Tapping some of the keys produce a (warning?) tone while other keys don't seem to cause any reaction at all. But I haven't been able to find any way of "logging on" to this system.

The only way I have found to shut down from that window is to just press the power button until the PC shuts itself down. This does NOT result in any warning that "Windows was not terminated properly last time" next time I try to boot!

I do not seem able to boot into command prompt either. Whenever I try that, or try to boot in safe mode I end up with the same window, in case in safe mode.

Is anybody able to give me some idea on what is going on here? (BTW, the last clone to the backup disk was done last November)

regards Sven

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