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#1
"Preparing your Desktop" and then blue screen with no HDD activity
I have read many posts with similar headings but none of them quite fit with the way my PC installation got into trouble.
I had the PC fitted with one HD and loaded the XP Pro sp3 32 bit OS on to that when it was first available. It has gone through all the updating procedures and is pretty stable.
But once the full support ceased I thought it was probably time to try out a later OS and settled on Win 7 Pro as the one most likely to fit my requirements. Earlier this year I added a new HD and partitioned it to suit a Win 7 installation from a MS DVD - paid for and fully licensed. I installed Win 7 to the partition I called W and that was fine and since then I have gradually been learning the oddities and kinks in the new OS. BUT, mostly I use the XP installation on partition C on the first HD. I used the Win 7 msconfig to set the boot options to default "Earlier version of Windows" and the alternative "Windows 7 Professional".
All was fine for several months until a couple of days ago when I selected the Windows 7 start option and Win 7 failed to start, as it has done OK many times before, and the Preparing your desktop/blue screen/no activity/not genuine windows routine that others have described came into play
I tried the boot from DVD and then try to repair 3 times and ended up with no improvement. On the last attempt I tried the explorer.exe method and then got a very incomplete desktop with a list of programmes. I tried to access them but every one failed with a message that access was not possible.
At that point I tried some lateral thinking and searching in XP to see if I could find information in either OS set of files. I stumbled across a log file called bcdinfo.txt and there all references to Win 7 mentioned the new name it had been given by the repair process "Windows 7 Professional (recovered)". Even worse, when I went to My Computer I discovered that the Win 7 partition W: was now called O: so hardly surprising that ALL programme shortcuts failed as the path via W: no longer existed.
Using the XP system manager I got the drive partitions letters back to where they should be and on XP all is still well. Checking the files on W shows all the folders and programme files where they should be and apparently undamaged.
So, eventually, to my question!
I don't want to try another repair via the boot from DVD route in case I simply end up in a mess again, and maybe with damaged files as well.
Is there a file somewhere (in XP or 7) that I can simply edit to put the correct name and drive letter back so that boot will work correctly again?
Tony