Question

XP PRO running on Virtual PC 2007 not booting. Only get a black screen.

Asked by: BuchananHauling

Had a copy of XP Pro running on a Vista PC using Virtual PC 2007.  Everything was working fine.  The customer started a process on the machine and left it running over night.  When he came back there was just a black screen for the Virtual.  When we do a restart you can see it post but then the screen goes black.  I was able to go in to a "Recovery Console" by booting off an XP cd and the directories are there however if I try to do a "Repair" to Windows from the CD it doesn't give that as an option only to reinstall Windows to a new directory.  Any ideas?  Thoughts?

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Asked On
2009-10-15 at 13:08:58ID24816234
Tags

XP Pro

,

Virtual PC 2007

Topics

VirtualPC

,

Windows XP Operating System

Participating Experts
2
Points
500
Comments
4

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Answers

 

by: kyodaiPosted on 2009-10-15 at 13:15:25ID: 25584401

If the windows XP cd doesn't offer repair then there must be a serious problem with the installation. Either windows itself or the Virtual PC file could be damaged. The problem might be due to an update or failure, from here hard to say. If you cant even use F8 to get into the boot options after POST you have serious problems with the boot loader. The easiest option would be to install xp into a secondary directory (C:\xprepair) and boot up the PC from the new directory, then see if you can determine what was damaged. YOu should then also have an option to start the older version of xp as the second option in boot screen (Just press down and enter on boot) - if it was just the bootup file then the new install has fixed it hopefully, so if that works you can delete the xprepair dir and the according entry in the boot.ini

 

by: garycasePosted on 2009-10-15 at 14:19:22ID: 25585024

I wouldn't install to a secondary directory on the same virtual disk ==> as with a "real" disk, the best thing to do when you have data to recover on a disk is STOP -- don't do anything on that drive.

Just do this:   Create a new virtual machine and install XP on it.   Then add the virtual disk from the problem system as a 2nd disk on that system.    You an then browse the disk from the other system;  run any recovery tools you might want to; etc.    This is the equivalent of removing a hard drive from a system and connecting it to another system -- but much simpler :-)

 

by: kyodaiPosted on 2009-10-15 at 14:33:46ID: 25585147

Well if you're into security and data integrity it would maybe be easier to simply make a copy of the virtual disk file and then get going, but adding it to a second virtual machine will also work fine. But well as it has problems with the bootup i fear it will be heard to fix from a second machine without installing windows, but do that first, maybe its really something easy like a broken win.ini or so (Although that would rather throw an error message).

 

by: BuchananHaulingPosted on 2009-11-02 at 13:06:46ID: 25723734

I was able to run Chkdisk on the drive and then was able to do a repair.  Thank you for all your help.

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