Help! old hand, new problem Win XP non-starting

As of this morning my winXP install does not startup, its gets through the black screen with the scrolling bar, and then onto the blue windows start screen and just sits there, I've tried safe mode. I'm running an aid0 partition for the system drive. The HDD's have intermittent activity, but leaving it alone for 15mins still leaves me on that blue screen.

P5B Dlx/wi-fi
E6600
WD 500Gb RE2's

Can't use windows disk to 'repair' as it won't recognise the HDD's as it wants the raid driver, the laptop I have can't create a floppy. I'm thinking of hooking up an old HDD with an old XP install to get access to the floppy to get to the repair features. Any other thoughts prior to this measure?
 
An update:

I can get the utility manager up by pressing windows-E, it complains about the narrator not being installed, but doesn't let me do anything useful.

is there a better way to monitor and control the startup of windows?
 

Zorg

Splendid
May 31, 2004
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Download UBCD for Windows and make a Boot CD. If you have RAID, and it sounds like you do, you will probably need to add the driver before burning. When you boot to it things run real slow just be patient.

Follow these instructions to replace the registry hive with the backup.

How to recover from a corrupted registry that prevents Windows XP from starting

MS says it doesn't work with OEM, but I think they mean OEM from HP, Dell etc. that has been modified. I'm not sure about the OEM from places like Newegg. I think it should work.

Good luck, let me know how it turns out, assuming you try it.
 
That'll be tonights job then, will let you know how things go, was planning on ditching the aid0 array this weekend, I suspect that this is a fault condition caused by a dodgy array, although its showing up as being ok in Bios.
 
Thanks Zorg, it did it, current build of UBCD can work with the ICH8R chipsets, the registry copy was easy from inside it. And I'm able to get back into windows again, few things are happy with me having done IE7 for one, but other than that I'm close enough to get on with migrating away from aid0.

I've tried to change the title of the thread to include -fixed after it but I can't, if a mod is watching can you arrange for it please?

Thanks again.
 

Zorg

Splendid
May 31, 2004
6,732
0
25,790
Sweet! :bounce: :bounce:

I went back and looked on the site and it appeared that it included the RAID/AHCI drivers but it really wasn't clear. It is nice to have confirmation.
 
I was sweating it a bit as it really wasn't clear, and the forums didn't help much. It took a couple of beers for dutch courage, and then it all worked perfectly fine.

I think that will be one of the few labeled CD's that I end up with. The instructions inside the installation are great as well, and give a number of instruction sets for dealing with common problems. It's in my repair kit from now on.

Thanks again.
 
one thing that works for me a lot of the time: load with last known good settings. Suprisingly this feature has saved me many times.

happy to hear yours is working again though!!!
 
Didn't fix it, it also wouldn't go to safe mode with command line, I thought that was a dos screen with drives available and not much else.

Thanks for the thought though, there's someone else out there that appeared to have the same problem as me, have we had a dodgy update come down perhaps?