Won't boot past blue MS Windows XP screen

[hikermann]

Windows XP Home SP3 : have had no problems for quite some time, gratefully. Yesterday, however, Windows Explorer was not showing my I:\ external drive (which has happened before), so went into Admin to Drive Management or whatever it's called where I have previously renamed that drive correctly and gone on with life. Usually C:\ (programs) evident as well as D:\ (partition with all files), E:\ (CD-ROM, etc., and the external drive with some other letter rather than its correct I:\ -- all I need to do is rename it to the correct I:\ and live happily ever after.

This time, though, the drives didn't show up as usual -- there was a Drive O and something else (E:\, as I recall); was a bit confused why it was different, so decided Drive O should be changed to I:\, which I did.

Suspect, however, that that was really C:\ and I changed it to I:\ ... 'cause now when I boot up it will go to the blue screen with MS Windows XP logo -- where the login box normally is -- and then just sit there. Is it possible I did, in fact, rename C:\ to I:\ and that is why the system won't go beyond the blue page

Tried to go into Safe Mode to see if that gave any options, but none appeared; also tried Recovery Console but couldn't find any useful stuff there.

Any thoughts / suggestions? Many thanks.

 

[goombawaho]

Well, let's see. C: is never I: via some magic change so I don't think that you changed C: (pretending to be I to O:
Something else is fubar. Shut down the PC and remove all removable disk drives/external hard drives/flash drives first.

Follow this to boot to the recovery console FROM an XP CD and get to the Command Prompt in the recovery console.
Link

Then run these commands to see what the partitions look like:
Type the command:
Diskpart

Once the Diskpart environment is ready, select first hard disk by typing the command:
Select disk 0

Once the first hard disk is selected, select the first partition by typing the command:
Select partition 1

View the name of the partition by typing the command:
Detail partition

Do all the above for partition 2 on disk 0 to see if there is another partition.
If there is a second physical disk, move on to it (disk 1) and do the same.
See if you can see what the disks have on them via DIR commands as well.

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