[Macboatmaster]

OK I am up to date now with the situation, what has happened since the Repair procedure is that the XP Cd has started the repair and for some reason has failed. Initially of course, XP had a file corruption so would only start in Safe Mode. The repair procedure has now started and has since failing left its temporary files on the hard drive, hence it is now stuck in that loop.
Make a XP boot floppy, if you have a floppy drive and boot from that, it will of course override the
Boot.ini and NTLDR on the HDD, HOPEFULLY and I am not sure about this it will also ignore the setup cycle files.
http://thpc.info/dua...uebootdisk.html

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That's what I was looking for. No, I have not used Hiren's MiniXP. I will try that next. At the stage where I tried all of the suggestions from all the threads I could find on this site without success. Been searching the web for other solutions. I just found my USB floppy drive and will try to create an XP boot CD from this working system and boot to it as you suggest on the "Looped" system. Got to go find a floppy first. Should be a few minutes or so. Thanks for all the support and tips!

[Frank T]

That's what I was looking for. No, I have not used Hiren's MiniXP. I will try that next. At the stage where I tried all of the suggestions from all the threads I could find on this site without success. Been searching the web for other solutions. I just found my USB floppy drive and will try to create an XP boot CD from this working system and boot to it as you suggest on the "Looped" system. Got to go find a floppy first. Should be a few minutes or so. Thanks for all the support and tips!

[Macboatmaster]

You cannot use the Boot.ini and NTLDR etc from the CD UNLESS it is exactly the same as the installed XP
I would use Hirens. BUT it is the same using your UBCD
It is the same as this using Barts.
I appreciate you will have already tried a System restore, but we need to try and get out of the setup loop

http://icompute.info...tem32config.htm

Edited by Macboatmaster, 08 May 2010 - 02:55 PM.

[Macboatmaster]

Signing of for a hour or so. Be back on 2330.

[Frank T]

System Restore was shut off just before all this happened. I did that to ensure no malware were hiding in the restore files. Bad timing for me. Did not get it restarted before I initially loaded the XP setup CD.

Neither of the boot disk or the boot CD that I created worked. I set the PC Cmos setting to boot only to floppy, rebooted with the boot floppy in drive a:. It started and read the A: drive, then switched to the hard drive showing the Windows XP welcome screen, then the "Setup is being restarted........" message on it's setup blue screen. Even happens when I disable the hard drive from the boot up list in the CMOS. I have not yet tried Hiron's CD to go into a file explorer to try something. Any suggestions? Thank you.

[Macboatmaster]

Albeit you turned off system restore, you will still have the restore points previously created
I think that this is worth a try using the details on the link I sent you.

[Frank T]

OK, I'm at the link you posted going through the process of creating the Bart PE CD. Will let you know how it goes.

[Frank T]

Macboatmaster:
I made a BartPE Boot CD (Great Tool! - thanks for that tip), used it to search my system for the Restore Point (RP_) folders/files without success. I'm sure I wiped them with cleanup tools when I was getting started with all this. Anyhow, the BartPE CD allowed me to network the system to my main system so that I could copy all the data across the network to a spare drive. It also found some master file table errors while running checkdisk on the drive and fixed them, but that still did not solve my looping problems. I repeated all the steps, booting to the CD, going through the setup process, choosing the 2nd R option, failing, re-trying with the first R option and then using bootcfg /rebuild and the "Failed to successfully scan disks for Windows installations" errors continue to show up. Tried creating and using boot floppies, copying the NT Boot files over to the damaged C: drive. Then going through the steps above again without success. Since I was able to copy the critical data files across, I'm finally giving up and will wipe the system and see if I can't get a good clean XP install. It will be a hassle since I'll have to reload everything, Office, Quickbooks, Antivirus/Antimalware, etc. but it's already taken far too long and I can't seem to progress pass the "Setup is being restarted........" or "Setup can not run under Safemode, Setup will restart now." error messages. It's been brutal to say the least! I do appreciate all the help and suggestions. I'll follow up with how the clean install went.

Edited by Frank T, 08 May 2010 - 10:26 PM.

[Frank T]

Macboatmaster:
I made a BartPE Boot CD (Great Tool! - thanks for that tip), used it to search my system for the Restore Point (RP_) folders/files without success. I'm sure I wiped them with cleanup tools when I was getting started with all this. Anyhow, the BartPE CD allowed me to network the system to my main system so that I could copy all the data across the network to a spare drive. It also found some master file table errors while running checkdisk on the drive and fixed them, but that still did not solve my looping problems. I repeated all the steps, booting to the CD, going through the setup process, choosing the 2nd R option, failing, re-trying with the first R option and then using bootcfg /rebuild and the "Failed to successfully scan disks for Windows installations" errors continue to show up. Tried creating and using boot floppies, copying the NT Boot files over to the damaged C: drive. Then going through the steps above again without success. Since I was able to copy the critical data files across, I'm finally giving up and will wipe the system and see if I can't get a good clean XP install. It will be a hassle since I'll have to reload everything, Office, Quickbooks, Antivirus/Antimalware, etc. but it's already taken far too long and I can't seem to progress pass the "Setup is being restarted........" or "Setup can not run under Safemode, Setup will restart now." error messages. It's been brutal to say the least! I do appreciate all the help and suggestions. I'll follow up with how the clean install went.

Decided to keep trying to fix/solve this problem for the benefit of all of us reading this. Hopefully I'll be able to beat it! Next steps: I will attempt to place the problem Hard drive from this system in another system (I know XP may give problems due to all the system changes but it may just work). Will likely try that sometime late tonight or tomorrow since today is Mother's day here. Stay Tuned!

[123Runner]

Frank T
Putting the drive in another unit will most likely give it fits. Without going back and reading all of this again (don't know if it has been suggested), but I would 1st place it in as a slave drive and run chkdsk /r on it.

123runner

[Frank T]

123runner:
Thanks for the suggestion. I will try that first putting the drive as a slave in another system and running chkdsk /r. I realize the fits you are talking about due to the different system components & drivers but was hoping to push through that bad looping problem.

[Macboatmaster]

I thought you had already done that in post 11.
and ran chkdsk in different ways 3 times.