Windows 2000 looping loading profile

[LiamC]

OK, I ghosted a drive with W2K on the D: drive and now when I boot into W2K it loops continuously at the Loading Profile bit.

I know somebody posted a link to MS support on this problem a while ago - something to do with the swap file being in the wrong place I think, but I can't find the link here anor on the MS site. Can anybody help?

 

[CityK]

Liam,

I'm unclear of what you did exactly but I suspect it something similar to: your original HDD had W2K on it, you added another HDD to the system, you either cloned or created an image of the boot partition and restored it on the second HDD, you unattached the first HDD, and tried to boot the second HDD but now find that it loops or you get a swap file error. Correct?

If so, boot to DOS and at the cmd just use fdisk /mbr, reboot, and the second HDD will now load W2K just fine.

CK

 

[LiamC]

CityK,

I had a drive with three partitions

C:\ -> Primary, 1.5G, WIN98SE FAT32
Extended with two logicals
D: -> Win2K NTFS
E: -> Data. FAT32

I'm fairly sure that the swap was on E:.

I ghosted the C: and D: drives and then installed the new.

restored the ghost images to the new drive and then copied the data partition files from within Windows

removed the old drive, set the new drive to have an active partition (C and booted W2K.

When it gets to the GUI, it normally asks for a login name, but I have it set to load a default profile. A dialog pops up saying

Loading something (user data?)

and then a dialog pops up saying Saving (something).

Somebody has posted a link to sn MS KB article on this and I though it was something to do with the swap being on the wrong partition, but i can't find it on the MS support site, nor doing a search here.

 

[timwhit]

Liam,

I know what you are talking about (it has happened to me), but I never found a solution to that problem. Although I do remember someone posting a link to the MSKB article a long while ago.

 

[LiamC]

Well I found the MS link, but it didn't work. So I blew the partition away and copied it back, then removed the old drive first and then booted OK.