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?