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Dual-boot Win7 & XP: unable to log into XP partition
Hi, I am having a problem that seems more like a Win XP problem, but since its part of my migration to Win7 and many people these days may be trying the same I dare to pose the question here in this Win 7 forum:
As I said, I am in the progress of migrating to Win7. As a transient solution until I have transferred and re-installed everything under Win7 I want to have a dual boot capability, i.e. I bought me a larger HD, created two partitions on it, installed Win7 on the first partition, and then I used a disk-imager (Acronis Disk Director) to copy my entire old XP disk 1:1 to the second partition of the new HD. I then set things up so I can choose between the two partitions using the Win7 boot manager. After some fiddling the choosing and booting in principle works fine.
BUT, when I try to start WinXP, I have the very strange effect, that the system at first boots and starts WinXP up fine up to the point where it presents the login screen. When I then enter my name and password my credentials at first seem to be accepted, i.e. I get a "Loading your settings..." dialog but to my dismay only seconds later that dialog always turns into "Logging off..." (???!@#@$&!) at which point the system hangs for some long period. If I wait long enough (~5 minutes) it eventually returns to the login screen again. I also tried to login as Administator but that failed as well (the error message mumbled something about no domain server to verify my id which is complete nonsense, since my XP system was never part of any domain, so there is no server in the world that could verify anything here!).
Any idea what could cause this and why can't I not log into that copied/moved 1:1 Window XP installation? Any hints/suggestions/pointers would be highly welcome!
Michael