[rwindrow]

I have an XP machine where the boot sequence is stuck in a loop. It comes up and asks you what OS you want to load and then repeats the sequence. I have reinstalled XP in place to no avail. Any ideas?

[Advertisements]

Couple of questions:

When it asks you which OS you want to boot from what choices do you have.

Did you just reinstall XP?

If you reinstalled XP did you erase the old XP (formatting the whole hard drive) or did you just install without reformating making it that your Hard Drive as 2 installation of the same XP on your Hard Drive maybe causing Windows not to know from which to boot from.

[Alzeimer]

Couple of questions:

When it asks you which OS you want to boot from what choices do you have.

Did you just reinstall XP?

If you reinstalled XP did you erase the old XP (formatting the whole hard drive) or did you just install without reformating making it that your Hard Drive as 2 installation of the same XP on your Hard Drive maybe causing Windows not to know from which to boot from.

[rwindrow]

I did reinstall Windows XP in place and the behavior was the same. Both choices are identical, i.e Windows XP. I have tried them both and they both used to work. Nothing that I recall has been done to the machine. I turned it off at night and got this behavior when I turned it on in the morning.

[Alzeimer]

How many hard drives do you have?

[rwindrow]

I have two hard drives. The 2nd drive contains system backups.

[Alzeimer]

So if you really have 2 Windows XP installations they are both on the same Hard Drive (different partitions) and your other Hard Drive only as data no Windows Installation.

Read all this article:

http://www.askdaveta...ant_to_run.html

[rwindrow]

The drive containing Windows only has one partition and both of the "choices" appear to load the same OS.

[rwindrow]

I should have said both "choices" seem to load the same OS back when it was working. Right now it is not getting as far as loading the OS. It is stuck in this loop I mentioned earlier.

[Alzeimer]

Your MBR (Master Boot Record) is probably damage, if you have an XP cd try this to repair it:

http://helpdeskgeek....x-mbr-xp-vista/

Hope this will help

[Mychael]

I cannot add anything constructive but I'm watching this problem with interest as I had almost the same problem a few weeks ago.
I had shutdown my computer normally after a normal days running and at the next boot up it also went into a repeating boot cycle. I only had one O/S installed.
Tried everything, booting from original installation CD, running Chdsk /r all the usual stuff, nothing fixed it. Never got resolved. Had to re-format the HDD.

The odd thing was that running hardware tests on the drive showed no errors at all, it still tests as a perfectly sound HDD. No explanation as to why it happened and why it could not be resolved.