VBScab

Late in the day, I know, but I had a similar problem where I get the CAD dalog but, when I actually *did* the three-finger salute, NOTHING happened! I trawled the net for WEEKS but gave up, resolving to rebuild. Weeks later, I picked the box up to do that rebuild and noticed that the battery had run down. Plugged it in, restarted and then noticed that the CMOS had seemingly cleared, as I had to confirm a bunch of "changes" (disk, etc) as it did the POST. Intrigued, I let the thing continue into its normal boot and hey presto! I can now log in as normal. So, my advice? Let the battery run down, then reset the CMOS yourself. There's normally a tiny push switch somewhere to do this: on mine, it was under the keyboard but yours could be anywhere. Check the docs.

Late in the day, I know, but I had a similar problem where I get the CAD dalog but, when I actually *did* the three-finger salute, NOTHING happened! I trawled the net for WEEKS but gave up, resolving to rebuild. Weeks later, I picked the box up to do that rebuild and noticed that the battery had run down. Plugged it in, restarted and then noticed that the CMOS had seemingly cleared, as I had to confirm a bunch of "changes" (disk, etc) as it did the POST. Intrigued, I let the thing continue into its normal boot and hey presto! I can now log in as normal. So, my advice? Let the battery run down, then reset the CMOS yourself. There's normally a tiny push switch somewhere to do this: on mine, it was under the keyboard but yours could be anywhere. Check the docs.

Master and Slave went out in the late 1800s, didn't it? Find the jumper slots on each drive which sets it (them) to use Cable Select (probably marked as 'CS' on the circuit board beneath the relevant jumper block). Then your booting drive (drive 0) goes at the end of the IDE cable (hopefully marked as 'Drive 0'), the other HD then goes on the remaining connector. DVD drive goes on the end of the IDE cable from the secondary controller. Beware of leaving connectors on the Master position when other drives are set to use CS. I just played that game trying to fix a non-booting drive and the machine would cycle between seeing both drives (including the one set as Master), then seeing only the CS drive. PC would restart, go back to seeing both drives, restart, see only one. Restart....you get the picture. Switching all drives to CS fixed that. I can't recall ever seeing this advice elsewhere, so maybe I was unlucky. All I know is that it was 100% repeatable.

Master and Slave went out in the late 1800s, didn't it? Find the jumper slots on each drive which sets it (them) to use Cable Select (probably marked as 'CS' on the circuit board beneath the relevant jumper block). Then your booting drive (drive 0) goes at the end of the IDE cable (hopefully marked as 'Drive 0'), the other HD then goes on the remaining connector. DVD drive goes on the end of the IDE cable from the secondary controller. Beware of leaving connectors on the Master position when other drives are set to use CS. I just played that game trying to fix a non-booting drive and the machine would cycle between seeing both drives (including the one set as Master), then seeing only the CS drive. PC would restart, go back to seeing both drives, restart, see only one. Restart....you get the picture. Switching all drives to CS fixed that. I can't recall ever seeing this advice elsewhere, so maybe I was unlucky. All I know is that it was 100% repeatable.

I have been trying ALL the usual fixes (Recovery Console/FixBoot/FixMBR, changing CMOS drive parameters, EVERYTHING) to get round the problem, where XP boots to a black screen with blinking cursor. Please, no preaching about back-ups: I have another thread going elsewhere as to why Ghost (on the original machine) insists that it's unable to defragment the virtual partition file. And no, that problem isn't due to use of an overlay - the disk/BIOS combo doesn't need one Finally, I managed to find a machine which had a similar-sized HD and used Ghost to image the non-booting HD to the new HD. Wonder upon wonder, the new HD boots! BUT.....but then XP thinks it's only about 1/3 way through Setup (the part even before entering Product Key...) and asks for the Setup CD (which I have). Questions: - is this scenario caused by the fact that the disk is in a completely different "host"? Original is a Dell XPS T550 (was P2, has PowerLeap upgrade to P3 1.2GHz)), new is an HP D530 (P4 2.8GHz) - is it safe to proceed, or am I going to lose all the user data I have on the current installation? - can I proceed with the *new* Setup and simply copy the profile(s) over once complete? - is there a file I can delete/edit that will fool Setup into believing that it's already done what it needs to do?