metafizx

bear with me, this is a long story.. i originally made an image of a hard drive onto usb external drive with v2i. i wound up having to restore this drive using a smaller hard disk. the file system fits fine, but the original drive is 80 GB (according to the v2i image) and the destination drive is 40GB (file system is only 14 GB). so I tried to restore the image to a usb external drive partition of 80 GB, and then resized it to 40GB. Then imaged it again...from the usb external drive. the final restore is to the 40GB IDE hard drive, but the problem is that the motherboard thinks the boot device is a usb drive now, but it is really IDE !! how can I change the boot device name from the usb to IDE ?? i am trying to boot windows xp home. thanks...

ok, got it fixed with the userinit.exe copied from another xp home installation however, there was no existing userinit.exe, seemed like something had deleted it. i tried to rename it to wsaupdater.exe but this did not help, so i kept the copy version named userinit.exe and it worked! so, thanks again for the help!

i had this problem as well, and thanks to the suggestion on this forum...copying over userinit.exe solved it. funny userinit.exe was gone from the pc, that's why it wouldn't boot. does anyone know why it would be gone ? could it be that it got infected from a virus and the scanner deleted it ? or could malware have gotten pissed from an uninstall and deleted it just to be "mal" ? thanks again for the help.

i tried the "install over the top" suggestion to fix this problem, but it didn't work. i will try the other suggestion to copy over the userinit.exe file and rename it wsaupdater.exe to boot from cd, make sure the bios (usually press F2 or DEL key at bootup to get into the bios, then go to boot options) is set to boot from cdrom. put in the windows xp cd and reboot the computer, should ask you to boot from cd. once the cd boots you can either choose install or repair option. install will either do a fresh install or install over the top of the current xp configuration. repair option will drop you into a dos like console, but you may need to know the administrator password. if you dont have it you will have to "blank" the password using offline password changer mentioned previously (but you must be very careful or you will screw it up worse). thank you for the suggestions, i will try the above and report back. 8)