Win7 logon screen stuck on 'Please Wait' no Safe Mode

matt0978 said:

Ok guys, so i've cloned an image from my old laptop to my new Seagate 7200.12 500GB HDD and using Paragon Virtualization Manager P2P made it ready to boot off new hardware. I've put it in my new tower system, installed all the drivers and bundled software and it's been running fine since building it over the weekend, albeit it every time I reboot I've been getting 'Setup is preparing your computer for first boot' which I'm hoping/intending to fix with a repair install. Now since installing a 2nd 500GB HDD (another seagate but not the same (both HDDs are SATA btw)) and partitioning it to image my parent's laptop I'd shutdown the PC, removed the HDD and rebooted. This time on reboot, and every boot I still get the 'preparing for first use' and then when I get to the logon screen I get 'Please wait!' with busy cursor and the screen keeps refreshing. I can't boot into any of the 'Safe-modes' to do a repair install and I don't want to wipe the disk and start again but me and the wife have a lot of precious info on it.

can anyone suggest a fix, possibly some CMD-line options? I have tried chkdsk /f /r which came up clean, bootrec/fixboot and bootrec/fixmbr failed to solve the issue.

It's very unlikely that you'll find a comprehensive solution for something this complex in less time than it would take you to back up your data - to an external drive if necessary - and then reinstall from scratch. All HDDs are slowly dying anyway. If everything you've got is on that machine, and there are no backups, then it's only a matter of time before you lose it all in a tragic HDD failure.

The "setup is preparing your computer for first boot" message is caused by the P2P ("Physical-To-Physical") converter having to strip off those portions of the old install which were hardware-specific. If you just take an image generated on hardware 'X' and plonk it unmodified on (completely different) hardware 'Y', the results are frequently outright catastrophic (BSODs and miscellaneous crashes). The only way that can ever work is if the conversion utility removes the configuration information which was specific to the source hardware, thereby forcing the target to re-run its hardware detection setup routines, hence the "...first boot" message.

In this case, something has gone dreadfully wrong, obviously. It's possible that a whole bunch of Paragon engineers working with a whole bunch of MS setup specialists would work it out, just as it's possible that the second I click "submit" on this reply somebody else will come by and point you to a tick-in-a-tickbox style of solution, but both of those eventualities are unlikely

A nice clean install will serve you well and prevent many future headaches caused by the conversion process, even if you should somehow manage to surmount this one.

To be frank, these types of conversions only tend to make sense when you're rolling out the image onto hundreds or thousands of targets in a corporate environment. For one machine to another - forget it! - just install from scratch and save yourself the grey hair.

H2SO4 said:

just as it's possible that the second I click "submit" on this reply somebody else will come by and point you to a tick-in-a-tickbox style of solution, but both of those eventualities are unlikely

I will go out on the limb and say, "Never going to happen." heh heh

torrentg said:

H2SO4 said:

just as it's possible that the second I click "submit" on this reply somebody else will come by and point you to a tick-in-a-tickbox style of solution, but both of those eventualities are unlikely

I will go out on the limb and say, "Never going to happen." heh heh

Oh, I dunno. Few things are more dispiriting than watching somebody diagnose and fix something in 7 seconds flat - after you've been working on it for a week