Help Needed - Reboot Loop when adding NTFS drive

[Antonin]

A colleage of mine runs XP home on their PC, and has a 40 gig C: drive that is NTFS. Probably due to extreme heat within the case, the drive has become partially corrupted.

I run a very stable Win 2K Pro machine, and wanted to temporarily remove the drive from her machine, and install it in mine, as a non-primary drive. That way, I could try to recover what data I could.

When I connect her drive on my system, it goes into a consistent re-boot loop. The PC gets as far as bringing up the logon prompt, and then reboots. When I remove the drive, all is fine.

I would really like to at least access the drive on my system. Is there a way that I can do so on my machine without causing the reboot loop? My other thought would be to reinstall XP on a new drive on her machine, and then try to recover what I can. Being a technical person, I just thought I'd give it a try.

Thanks!

Ant.

 

[dk87]

What type of drive? IDE? Same channel? Different channel? Master/Slave?

 

[Antonin]

dk87 - Thanks!

I have this drive connected as master on the secondary channel. My main C: drive is master on my primary channel. I also tried booting into safe mode (I didn't mention this in my original post), and it is verrrrry slow, and takes approximately 15 minutes just to load windows in safe mode. I finally got tired of waiting, and rebooted the machine, it was so slow.

Ant.

 

[dk87]

Is W2K set to automatically assign drive letters? Is it possible that there is a conflict? Do you have something running at startup looking for a D: drive that may be invalid if this new drive becomes D:? Try setting your system drive to master and the other drive to slave on the primary IDE connector, remove for now the secondary. If that doesn't work, try pressing F8 when the system boots (right when the splash screen is displayed) and go to a command prompt only, see if you can read/copy files without all the GUI loaded.

 

[wolluf]

Couple of thoughts - bit like dk87's

- where is pagefile defined to be created in 2k installation?

- wondering if your colleagues drive is taking the 'C:' drive slot (so would second the try it as slave approach).

You could also try loading recovery console - & see if you can read the drive from there -

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;229716

or disconnect your drive, get

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

and boot from that - or do this in your colleagues machine.