I wanted to upgrade my PC, so I've:
- bought and installed a new hard drive, and copied all the partitions from the old drive to the new one (using the old system)
- bought and installed a new motherboard ASUS A88X-PRO together with the new hard drive (the old one has been removed)
- moved all the logical partitions on the new drive to the right to reserve space for Ubuntu (I want a dual boot system) using the new system and Ubuntu Live CD
- found a Windows XP iso-file with SATA drivers embedded and installed it on the first primary partition (I needed that because my old Windows XP distribution doesn't have SATA drivers)
- tried to reboot the system to Windows XP and here I got stuck.
The system shows a normal Windows XP start screen for a second, then it shows the BSOD for a fraction of second, then tries to reboot again. I can't read the BSOD because it disappears too quickly. I even tried to make a video with my camera in accelerated video mode - no way, the text is unreadable, it's too blurry.
I tried to test the system with the Ubuntu Boot Repair Disk, and it didn't find any significant problems (the report is here). I've copied the mbr.bin
from this disk to the /dev/sda
- it didn't help. I've checked partitions alignment using the Western Digital Align Disk - it said that all partitions alignment was OK.
The Windows XP setup F2 function is useless for me because it immediately asks me to insert something in the a:
drive, and I don't have one.
What else should I try to resolve the problem? Are there any ways to read the BSOD text without actually looking at the screen?
UPDATE #1: I know about UEFI
and Secure Boot
- both features have been disabled in the BIOS. Also I've updated the motherboard BIOS to the most recent version (2001) today.
As for the Automatic Restart on System Failure
feature disabling - I've just found a very funny page. How can I access the Windows Control Panel
without system booting? It reminded me a problem with some old BIOS - if keyboard isn't attached it'd output a message "The keyboard is not attached. Press F1 to continue".
UPDATE #2: I didn't mention before what particular Windows XP iso-file I used for installation. This file is available on many sites (for example, here), and it has the following name and length (in bytes):
Windows_XP_Professional_SP3_Nov_2013_Incl_SATA_Drivers.iso 647823360
It looks like this Windows XP iso-file is a main problem, at least for the hardware configuration I have. This version can be installed, but it refuses to boot. However, I could install my old version of Windows XP (without SATA drivers) after I've switched SATA support in the BIOS to the IDE emulation mode (thanks to Bharat G for the idea), and the system boots without problems after that.
So, two my main questions can be now rephrased like this:
- What's wrong with this
Windows_XP_Professional_SP3_Nov_2013_Incl_SATA_Drivers.iso
version? - How to break the Windows XP reboot loop and get some information about the reason of failure (
F8
never worked for me)?