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Topic: Need help with booting XP after using gparted -- blinking underscore

I have a disk that was failing, so I bought a new one and used gparted livecd to copy the 2 partitions (an OEM and my NTFS partition with WinXP) to the new disk. I setup the NTFS as the boot partition, and figured I'd be off to the races.

When the machine boots from the new HD (it's the primary IDE master; old broken disk removed), it just sits with a black screen with a blinking underscore a few lines down from the top left. I ran the XP recovery console and did a fixboot and a fixmbr, but that didn't have any noticeable effect. I mucked around with some other utilities on the LiveCD, including TestDisk which allowed me to install alternative MBR boot code. When I booted with that, it presented the 1234F menu and when I chose partition 2 (my XP install), it just did the same blinking underscore. I went so far as to do a repair install of XP, but it still won't successfully boot from the HD. At some point, things got really hosed after a fixmbr and I had to re-copy the 2 partitions. I then did a fixmbr and it would boot to a "Reboot and select proper boot device Or insert boot media in selected boot device" error. Turned out this was due to the NTFS partition not being marked bootable. Once I fixed that, I was back to the same blinking underscore. I tried a brand new install of XP on a new partition, created within the XP installation routine, but it failed to boot from the hard disk for the second part of installation.

I imagine, given the above evidence, that we have gotten past the MBR portion of booting, and must be either in PBR code or in NTLDR. At the blinking underscore, computer doesn't respond to three finger salute. I'm guessing that it's not to the point of processing boot.ini, because I see no change in behavior if I rename boot.ini.

When I boot with BartPE, everything looks good. Ran chkdsk against the disk, and it was OK. I even copied a different NTLDR (from rescue directory) to my XP installation's root directory but still no change in behavior. Then, I deleted NTLDR, but still no change -- still a blinking underscore. That leads me to believe that I am getting hung somehow in the PBR code. Of course, I could be wrong.

Anyone have a clue what I should do next?

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Re: Need help with booting XP after using gparted -- blinking underscore

Hm, copying ntfs is not copying windows !
If you want to clone your old hard drive with a new one, you should try G4U.

I personaly sucesfully copied and boot an xp partition, but i used grub bootloader to boot off the copied XP.

BTW, if your old drive was sick, it could be a reason to have unsucessfully copied your xp...

Larry
GParted-project Admin
Former GParted-LiveCD maintainer (2007)

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Re: Need help with booting XP after using gparted -- blinking underscore

Thanks, Larry. I wish I understood what the problem was with my initial approach. The piece that I don't understand in the boot process is how the code in the PBR finds NTLDR, and my guess is that that's where my trouble was. But I would have thought that fixboot would have fixed it.

Anyway, you led me in the right direction. Seems like G4U wouldn't deal with drives that were giving read errors, but a little research led me to DDRESCUE, which does. So, I dl'd and burned a Knoppix LiveCD, booted from it, then dl'd the DDRESCUE source and compiled it and ran it, and was able to copy from the old, bad disk to the new, good one. 179 errors, but the thing boots. Yay!

Thanks for your help! Now, when I'm feeling brave, I'll expand that partition with gparted...

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Re: Need help with booting XP after using gparted -- blinking underscore

Could you please past some link to your famous ddrecue ?
It can be interesting to recover dying drives...

BTW, what do you call "PBR" ?

Larry
GParted-project Admin
Former GParted-LiveCD maintainer (2007)

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Re: Need help with booting XP after using gparted -- blinking underscore

I started by looking up g4u:

http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/

Then, searching the list archive for "bad sector" since I didn't see anything that mentioned g4u dealing with disk errors, I came across this post:

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/mess … d=12653314

Which talked about what I was dealing with, and it mentioned 3 utilities:

Ddrescue (http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html)
safecopy (http://freshmeat.net/projects/safecopy/)
dd_rescue (http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/)

A little more searching suggested that the general opinion was that ddrescue was the preferred solution, so that's what I went for.

Oh, and PBR == Pabst Blue Ribbon, a cheap beer in these parts ;-)

Or it means Partition Boot Record. Seems like both Partition Boot Record and Partition Boot Sector are used.

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Re: Need help with booting XP after using gparted -- blinking underscore

tastewar wrote:

I
Or it means Partition Boot Record. Seems like both Partition Boot Record and Partition Boot Sector are used.

thx !

Larry
GParted-project Admin
Former GParted-LiveCD maintainer (2007)

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Re: Need help with booting XP after using gparted -- blinking underscore

You're welcome.