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Broken XP login after moving partition


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#1
Serial Bumpy

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I wanted a bigger harddrive for both my Ubuntu Linux installation and XP installation, so I split them up onto two separate, bigger hard drives and 'grew' them. I spent a whole day getting the grub boot loader to work again on my Ubuntu installation, but it finally correctly points to both my OSs.

However, when booting up my Windows XP installation, after a successful log in with an admin account, it logs off immediately, taking me back to the log in screen. There are no other accounts. I've been able to access with an admin account from the recovery console, ran FIXMBR and C:/WINDOWS/SYSTEM32/>COPY USERINIT.EXE WSUPDATER.EXE (not sure I spelled that last program correctly for this forum topic) to no effect. Trust me, before you say it... IT IS NOT MALWARE. The original XP installation partition from my old hard drive boots up fine.

I've spent hours reading other forums, people talking about drive letters and such, but I can never do their solutions because I have only 1 Windows XP capable computer and no way to get to a GUI for registry changing.

Any ideas? Thank you so much in advance. Also, don't spare me the tech talk; I'm a seasoned computer user.

In case it matters, the XP installation is on a hard drive with one other partition. As I said before, the grub loader is on a different hard drive.
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#2
Neil Jones

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When XP is installed it ties itself to a certain partition on a certain drive.
Now if you break the apron strings as it were and clone the machine to another drive and then tell Windows to load from a different partition on the second drive, it's not going to be very happy about it because the stuff it wants isn't where it wants it to be. Windows doesn't like being shifted about like this and you realistically only have one of two options: Repair it (if it'll let you repair as it'll probably try to rewrite the boot sector) or put a new installation back into that partition after wiping it.
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#3
Serial Bumpy

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When XP is installed it ties itself to a certain partition on a certain drive.
Now if you break the apron strings as it were and clone the machine to another drive and then tell Windows to load from a different partition on the second drive, it's not going to be very happy about it because the stuff it wants isn't where it wants it to be. Windows doesn't like being shifted about like this and you realistically only have one of two options: Repair it (if it'll let you repair as it'll probably try to rewrite the boot sector) or put a new installation back into that partition after wiping it.


First, thank you for the quick response. As much as Windows doesn't like being shifted about like this, I must have my Windows be complacent with it's new home. I've often been dissatisfied with the Windows OS; however, I have faith that this problem doesn't require a re-installation. The fact that the partition boots up to the login screen suggests that it can be salvaged yet. Plus, all I have is an XP install cd from before SP2 and I can't tell you how many programs I have customized to my liking on the current installation.

Anyway... about this boot sector thing. How do I fix that? As said above, I've already run the FIXMBR command at recovery console. No luck. Anything else you Windows Wizzes can think of? Thank you.
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