OK,
Here's the story.
I have a laptop that came with windows vista. As my laptop only has 512 MB of shared OS and Video RAM I can't really watch DVDs that well on it.
Also at the moment only XP is compatable with all my externall hardware as well.

So...
I clonned XP over to a second partition on my drive but...

When my bootloader tries to boot up XP, I get the Windows Logo for about 3 seconds then i get a BSoD for half a second and my computer restarts without giving me time to see anything but a flash of blue. And so on, and so on, and so on.

I'm currently using my Vista partition at the moment and have full access to files on my XP partition.

I would just install Windows fresh but my install disc can't recognise my laptop drive (I think it's an SCSI or RAID or something).

I would actually rather do a fresh installation so if I can get that to work that would be best.

Please help if you can,
daffy_elmo

What you have done is messed with the Boot area of the computer. Do you have a licence in order to use this XP os on multiple computers?

I'm prety sure my boot sector's not messed up (It was for about a month, but I've fixed it now with Paragon's boot manager). After all I get the windows boot screen with the progress bar at the bottom for about 3 secs then it's just "a flash of blue"!

And yes I've got two installation discs, but I lost the key to one of them so I had to use the one i'd already installed on my desktop.

I want to do a clean installation but both discs won't recognise my laptop hard drive.

thanks for replying
daffy_elmo

This post has been edited by daffy_elmo: Jun 5 2007, 11:02 PM

I am not talking about your boot sector. The MBR is probably fine however your boot INI may not be.

We want to do is stop windows from automaticly restarting and display the blue screen error message.

To do this go to.

Click on Start go to control Panel Click on System (or preformance and maitnance and then go into system)
Then go into Advanced tab Under startup and recovery click on settings

Under system Failure uncheck Automaticly Restart and tell us where the Small dump directory is set to be located.

It is probibly %systemroot%\minidump

On the blue screen we need the information under technical information

This post has been edited by tuxmaster: Jun 6 2007, 12:24 AM

OK will do ASAP.
Do I have to do this on my windows xp system or my vista system?
(I can't log in to windows xp, but I do have access to all files though.
won't be able to do it till about 2 hours from this post though.

Thanks
daffy_elmo


This post has been edited by daffy_elmo: Jun 6 2007, 01:12 AM

If you are only getting the blue screen of death from your XP system then do it from that if from your vista system from that if from both please inform.

Hi,

I'm coming to this from a different angle (corrections are always welcome )
I believe that your MBR is screwed up.

1.A cloned installation is not necessarily bootable unless it iis made so.
2.Adding a cloned install requires editng of the boot.in on the primary partiotion
3.In general you have to install the older OS first.

You may want to look at this for example
at Syschat http://www.syschat.com/
and Featured Tutorials
http://www.syschat.com/dual-boot-vista-xp-...ready-1946.html

There are obviously many more examples,but I had this one ready

Pete.

Howdy:

Unfortunately, it is the key code that makes the installation legal or not and NOT the fact you have two cd's.

Using a key code already in use would be against Microsoft's EULA and very illegal.

Murray

Murray is absolutely correct. We cannot help you any further until you have a legal copy of XP on that machine.

Thread closed. Thank you for understanding.