Cannot start Win 2k on dual boot system

[Vinod Kumar]

Hi

I am using a dual boot system with Windows XP Pro on one HDD and Windows 2000 Pro on another. Everything was going fine until recently when Windows 2k refused to boot up. When I try to boot Win 2k it restarts before the log-in screen appears and repeats the process in an unending loop.

I tried to boot to safe mode and last known good configuration, but both resulted in the same loop-rebooting.

The HDD Win 2k is on is accessible from XP, however. But I have certain programmes installed on Win2k and works done with them, so I want to avoid the pain of installing all those programmes on XP too.

Regards.

Vinod

[Paul Komski]

How were you organising the dual boot. A repair installation should correct things but possibly you could repair Win2K just by using the Recovery Console. Both best done with the XP HDD temporarily removed from the system - unless you are using that drive to boot from in the first place. More specific details including your one or two boot.ini files could be helpful.

Did this happen out of the blue or had you changed any partitions prior to the problem beginning.

[Vinod Kumar]

Did this happen out of the blue or had you changed any partitions prior to the problem beginning.

To the best of my knowledge it happened out of the blue.

[Vinod Kumar]

I ran a repair process by inserting the W2k CD and choosing the repair option at Setup. First I chose fast repair, but it was not successful. At the second attempt I was asked to insert an emergency repair disk and I did so. In the process it showed a message saying that it could not copy the file speech.dll. I was given two options: one to retry and the other to skip copying the file. The first proved unsuccessful so I chose to skip. The following were the other files I had to skip thus: spchtel.dll, vcmd.exe, vcauto.tlb, vtext.tlb, vcmshl.dll, speech.hlp, speech.cnt, Xlisten.dll, Xvoice.dll, Xcommand.dll, Vdict.dll, Vtext.dll, Xtel.dll, WrapSAPI.dll, mstask.ini.

After completing the repair thus the system restarted. But things were the same as they had been before the repair except that it also killed my XP installation. However, I booted from the XP CD and repaired XP,but 2k remains in the same condition.

I think I must disconnect the XP HDD and repeat the repair on 2k as you suggested.

Vinod

[Paul Komski]

You havent said how you choose between the OSes on your dual boot system and is there a boot.ini file on both hard drives.

It also sounds as if your Win2K CD is suspect when a number of files are not getting copied properly during setup.