Trouble Bootingh WinXP Home

[Screamingmonk]

Hi.

XP won't load - it goes through the motions but falls over after displaying the rendered XP load screen (Windows is starting...). It just reboots without going any further. It just keeps rebooting over and over.

It does the same thing if I try booting in Safe Mode.

I think what may have caused this is the following:

I was getting an error message when loading WinXP - something about KERNEL32.dll that popped up when Windows had loaded. I could click ok and carry on as usual but it was annoying so I looked around on the internet and found some info about how to fix it.

I should probably mention here that I recently installed this veriosn of WINXP on a machine that already had 98SE on it and I didn't overwrite it. My defunct 98SE files are in the \Windows drive and my XP files are in the \WINXP drive.

To try and solve my KERNEL32 problem, I went into Safe mode and re-named a file called Winmm in \WINDOWS\SYSTEM\, thinking this might have caused the conflict (i.e. renamed it in the 98SE directory).

Since I did that and re-booted I have had the above problem.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

[Ol'Tunzafun]

Since XP installed alongside Win98 it is probably safe to assume that the partition is still formatted FAT32 which means that you can boot from a Win98 Startup disk which if necessary, you can download from bootdisk.com, and browse back to that file and rename it back to Winmm or whatever it was.
That may allow you to boot normally. From that point you might consider saving your data and doing a clean reinstall of XP.

[Screamingmonk]

Nope, couldn't do that - the drive has only got one partition - all the data is now NTFS so booting with win98SE disk just reveals the basic FAT data that's left on the system but I can't access the file that needs to be changed.

Thanks anyway!

[Ol'Tunzafun]

A Repair install should get you back to your data but a clean install would be the ticket. The upgrade path from 98 to XP has always been fraught with problems.

http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

[caveminder]

have you tried an xp boot floppy? that would be booting from ntfs not fat32 for renaming file. with XP running backup everything you want and wipe drive for fresh new ntfs partition for XP. solve 98-fat32 problem fast.