Booting Problem -Its in a loop

[qureshi]

Hi,
I got a new hard disk and thought that it would be good to ghost the drive. I had an old version of the ghost.exe which i tried. I got a message of a critical error and the process stopped.

I gave up the idea of ghosting but when i rebooted my system it give me the screen where i have to enter the username and password. I do that and then it displays the same dialog box again asking me for the username and password. Its in endless loop.
I tried the repair options by pressing F6 and then selecting Repair option.

What could have gone wrong, How can I undo this, By the way i also tried "Last known good configuration".

What do i have to do to ghost my disk.

Thanks

 

[wolluf]

Have you any other users set up you could try logging in with?

http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd/

has a linux boot disk which can reset Administrator password.

I don't understand the F6 then repair reference. If you boot from 2k install CD, you get options for new install or Repair. Then Repair has 2 options - C - recovery console & R - repair. Also, if you choose new install & it detects an existing 2k installation it will offer to reapir it (type R). F6 is usually to supply SCSI/RAID drivers to the install.

As for ghost - you need to create a ghost boot disk of the right type (from within windows), and you also need to have somewhere to save the ghost image to (eg, CD writer, another drive/partition on the same machine or another machine on the network).

 

[thebige]

Hello qureshi, I think what happened is that the pagefile got corrupted on the new hard drive during the ghosting process. This will cause the looping you refer to. Try going into safe mode and see if you can get in that way prolly not though. I believe I just reloaded the pc when it happened to me. That has been a while though. Hope this helps.

BIG E

 

[ScorpioX]

Thebige is probably correct. I have seen this as well. In my case it was because the image I used was a partiton image rather then a disk image. The partion image had the pagefile set to another drive/partiton. So when I imaged it over to another machine it could not find the Pagefile.sys. hence it prompts for log in allows input looks ok then reboots over and over with no error. The only fix I could find that was quick was to move the pagefile to the image partition and recreate it. I have since found some documentation that has solved this problem, for the future. I now create a 10mb pagefile on the OS drive and keep the larger main pagefile on another drive partition. Problem solved, even if you create a image of the OS partition then move to another machine or have to reimage the machine. W2k will use the 10mb to boot then ask you to resize, if you don't it will do it for after it runs out of resources.


Good luck,
ScorpioX