I mistakenly launched XP Setup and want to know how to stop it from progressing further. I have another XP installed on another virtual disk. Rebooting from there allowed me delete the Setup files. Or so I thought ! The main XP installation however continues to try to launch Setup. Just about whatever I do, it ends in tears. My question is … how do I stop XP on this disk from thinking it has to launch Setup? I don’t want to reinstall XP, as that will involve a huge amount of work to recreate my environment.

I am able to choose my operating system when I press F8

If I launch the corrupt system in “safe mode” or “domain controllers”, everything appears to progress normally until the very end… when the XP black desktop appears (and just before the icons appear). At that point I get the error message
“Windows XP cannot run under safe mode” and I am asked to click OK to consult a log file. The screen however is actually frozen at that point, so I have to unplug the machine.

Otherwise if I launch in debugging mode or “Last known good configuration”m I get a message saying “Setup will restart now” and then “ Setup is being restarted…” while the usual XP installation logos start to appear e.g. “An exciting new look etc…”. Shortly afterwards I get
“An error that has been encountered that prevents setup from continuing ”,
Again the screen freezes so I need to unplug the machine.

I looked at the difference config and ini files, and compared the Windows directories on both disks, also looking for hidden files. I looked at the log files…
setuplog.txt refers to this command, but I can’t file neither the file nor the folder (nor is the corrupt setting on D)
d:\xpsprtm\base\ntsetup\syssetup\syssetup.c,6434,BEGIN_SECTION,Installing Windows NT

setupact.log
The critical system information file K:\WINDOWS\system32\$winnt$.inf is corrupt or missing

Any ideas very welcome ! Thanks!

Search for all files and folders for boot.ini

You can either paste it here, or just remove the line stating Windows setup yourself

How to edit the Boot.ini file in Windows XP

Please follow all steps in that link

Let me know how it goes

This is the one you want:

but you say virtual, so I'm not sure if virtual gives a little bit different syntax

No luck there ! Yes I tried different options with boot.ini like /safeboot:minimal /sos /bootlog All these steps proceed normally... logs look good ... and then at the very I get "Setup is being restarted" (chkdsk by the way says that the volume is clean ). I am not aware of any option to swith off the setup process! Thanks for any advice!

Actually did you want to paste the boot.ini, because I really do believe it's in there.

Otherwise it's bootcfg and rebuild the boot manager, although the virtual still concerns me.

Thanks for looking at this Kimsland, but I don't see what you are getting at.

bootcfg.exe is an old file, dating from 2004. All the other cfg files cannot be edited, and don’t look as if they have been tampered with..

The boot.ini looks standard to me
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(4)\WINDOWS
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(4)\WINDOWS="Good bootable XP" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Bad XP – runs setup" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

There are no other files that I can identify as the culprits that want to put me into setup mode. Thanks for any advice.

Well if you remove the 2nd line (you have named bad)
And then save the boot.ini, it will not load at startup any longer.

Also the bootcfg is a program to repair your boot partition, I didn't want you to check the actual file.

If anybody still has any ideas on how to stop setup from running...??! (thanks Kimland... I know I can edit out the bad xp and that I can run bootcfg... but I want to get the old XP running again..)

I think the only option is to remove the "bad" Xp choice line
And then run a Repair on your system.

Microsoft's Windows XP Professional Repair Install step by step
Microsoft's Windows XP Home Repair Install step by step