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anonymous 23 January 2009

Hey Guys, having a booting issue at the moment. Not sure if you guys can help but any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I have a HP Laptop running XP that I use as my DAW. I also have an extra HDD with Vista Business loaded. I swap the HDDs when I want to use my laptop as a normal pc (surf the net, etc).

I was on the net one day using the laptop (Vista HDD) and the battery went flat and the laptop shutdown. At this point I was over the net anyway and wanted to do some work on the DAW so I swaped the HDs and plugged the power cord in and tried to boot up my DAW (XP). What an idiot!

The message that popped up was that vgaoem.fo was missing. I did a bit of investigating on the net and found that I could expand this file from the original XP CD and copy this to the windows/system directory. I booted into Linux and copied this file to c:windows/system directory. I then rebooted but still would not boot into Windows. I did some more investigating on the net and found if I ran the chkdsk /r from the recovery console from the original XP CD should fix the problem.

The chkdsk /r function found some errors and fixed them. I then rebooted but this time the XP splash screen comes up and all looks good. After a moment the splash dissapears to a black screen. I then rebooted and went back into the recovery console and ran the fixboot and bootcfg /rebuild commands. Rebooted but does the same thing - XP splash screen then hangs at a black screen - this is where I'm at now.

What's a boy to do?

Any help guys would be appreciated. cheers

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Comments

anonymous Sat, 01/24/2009 - 12:12

I had a similar problem when I installed a video driver that wasn't actually for my computer. I was able to boot in safe mode and uninstall the driver. Maybe you just need to reinstall the video driver from safe mode? However if your video driver got hosed, who knows what else is toast. Maybe it's time to pull off all your documents though Linux and do a clean XP install?

Space Sat, 01/24/2009 - 14:04

"I have a HP Laptop running XP that I use as my DAW. I also have an extra HDD with Vista Business loaded. I swap the HDDs when I want to use my laptop as a normal pc (surf the net, etc).

I was on the net one day using the laptop (Vista HDD) and the battery went flat and the laptop shutdown. At this point I was over the net anyway and wanted to do some work on the DAW so I swaped the HDs and plugged the power cord in and tried to boot up my DAW (XP). What an idiot! "

What? This reads like you are using two external hard drives. And where does Linux fit into this multi-platformed rig?

What does the hard drive that is on the laptop run? MacOSX?

anonymous Sun, 01/25/2009 - 17:16

thank-you very much Space for all your wonderful help. much appreciate it.

you're a kind person with a kind heart! - don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

ANYWAY

tried booting into safe mode with no luck. not sure how I can install the video driver (if it's the video driver that's causing the problem).

I guess my last resort would be to re-install XP - not sure what else I can do at this point :(

anonymous Mon, 01/26/2009 - 23:34

thanks mate, unfortunately i cannot boot into safe mode. The option is there but when I select "safe mode with command prompt" or just "safe mode" for that matter the system starts loading the drivers then just hangs.

The system hangs at windowssystem32drivershotcore3.sys (if that means anything).

cheers

Space Tue, 01/27/2009 - 16:09

It is Vista, so loading can still take a while, so patience should be used. Watch the hard drive led(rapid blinking), if it is doing this, the computer is still loading so you wait.

Hotcore3.sys is part of the Vista engine or graphics. Could mean something to a Vista tech, doesn't mean anything to me.

If you have the start up or boot up Vista CD/DVD use that instead. If you have the option to repair or recover, this may be a better option. Either way, repair or re-install, is going to take a long time so this should be your "history" lesson on hot swapping lap top hard drives .

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