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General discussion

System hangs immediately after OS menu.

by smitjb Nov 28, 2004 7:44PM PST

I have a PC which has recently started hanging on startup. It has Win 95 on the C: drive and Windows XP on the D: drive. Win 95 boots up OK, but it is an ancient installation and hasn't been used for ages and it has never been able to recognise the d: drive.

When I select XP from the OS menu, the machine immediately hangs and has to be switched off. Safe mode does the same.
I ran a setup repair on the XP installation with no result.
I installed a second copy of XP on the D: drive and it hangs at the same point (the installation never finished because the machine hung at the re-boot in the middle of the installation.)

I booted into the recovery console and ran fixboot and fixmbr and this made no difference. As far as I can tell with the limited tools available in the recovery console the D: drive is working and intact.

I am at a loss.
The fact that 2 different installations fail implies it is either hardware (but the disk behaved ok during setup and repair) or something that the XP installations have in common (e.g ntldr, but wouldn't the repair have fixed that?)

Any pointers as to what to try next would be appreciated.

Discussion is locked

5 Posts
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Re: System hangs immediately after OS menu.
by David Chan Nov 28, 2004 8:28PM PST

You did not provide sufficient info.

But the fact that you have W95 on the C Drive would indicate that your PC is over 5 years old and either a PII or PIII?

If such is the case then you might want to check your HDD to see if it is failing?

Your motherboard BIOS may also need to be updated for XP.

As for why the D Drive is not recognized when you boot into W95 the reason is that your D Drive is in NTFS which is what XP runs on and W95 cannot view NTFS partition on the same Computer.

I would unplug the HDD and install a new HDD and start over with just XP.
Then plug back the old HDD and retrieve your data.

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Re: System hangs immediately after OS menu.
by smitjb Nov 28, 2004 8:44PM PST

>But the fact that you have W95 on the C Drive would >indicate that your PC is over 5 years old and either a >PII or PIII?

>If such is the case then you might want to check your >HDD to see if it is failing?

The HDD is just over a year old.

>Your motherboard BIOS may also need to be updated for >XP.

The BIOS is reasaonably up to date and the machine has been functioning happily with XP for a year or so.

>As for why the D Drive is not recognized when you boot >into W95 the reason is that your D Drive is in NTFS >which is what XP runs on and W95 cannot view NTFS >partition on the same Computer.

Its more fundamental than that. I originally installed XP because W95 didn't recognise the disk (although the bios did). There was a reasonable explanation at the time, but I can't remember what it was. That is not relevant to this problem though.

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Re: System hangs immediately after OS menu.
by David Chan Nov 28, 2004 9:32PM PST

I'd wipe off the W95 installation and start over with only XP.

Again you did not provide info on your drive partitioning.
If the C Drive is large enough say 20GB you can safely format it and install XP on the C Drive.

Are your data backed up?

If so delete both C & D Drives and start over with a clean install of XP.

You assume that your HDD is not defective but have you run any diagnostic tests?

With HDDs being so inexpensive and currently only 1 year warranty is offered for most makes, do not expect HDDs to be manufactured to last a long time.

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Re: System hangs immediately after OS menu.
by skippyd333 Nov 28, 2004 10:17PM PST

I would also wipe off 95 and delete both partitions and then remake 2 partitions. One for Xp and another for Storage or another operating system like Linux.

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Re: System hangs immediately after OS menu.
by skippyd333 Nov 28, 2004 10:21PM PST

If its a western digital the warranty is good for 5 years. How big is the HD?

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