gbhall
Posts: 2,419 +77
Bit surprised when this happened to me. Using WinXP-pro SP3 by the way.
The bios boot showed as normal, then no windows boot occurred, instead I just got a black screen, unresponsive, with a blinking cursor. PC would not boot into safe mode either. Oh, oh.
Took me about three minutes to solve it, and this is what it was.
Prior to the boot, I had downloaded, but not installed, the latest MS patch Tuesday - no less than 10 security updates this month ! Obviously, a prime possibility, but I had not installed them yet ! Not really so likely then....what did I do just before?
Immediately prior to the closedown before, I had taken a full drive image using Acronis TrueImage home 2010. But then, I always do this before a patch Tuesday, and never had this problem before. Wait, what was different this time? Well previously I saved the image to an old IDE drive, but lately, that drive had become unreliable and I think it was responsible for occasional blue screen F4 errors, so I had scrapped it.
Hence the drive image was written to my add-on USB hard drive instead. Now the solution hove into view. I rebooted again, going into the bios, and LO AND BEHOLD, Acroinis appears to have taken into it's head that the USB drive should now be promoted to the top of the boot order !!! WTF !!! Changed the boot order to what it should be, and everything is fine again.
I am now doubly doubtful of Acronis, who's 2010 version seems grossly inferior in every way to the previous version 9 I knew and loved. Shades of Norton......
The bios boot showed as normal, then no windows boot occurred, instead I just got a black screen, unresponsive, with a blinking cursor. PC would not boot into safe mode either. Oh, oh.
Took me about three minutes to solve it, and this is what it was.
Prior to the boot, I had downloaded, but not installed, the latest MS patch Tuesday - no less than 10 security updates this month ! Obviously, a prime possibility, but I had not installed them yet ! Not really so likely then....what did I do just before?
Immediately prior to the closedown before, I had taken a full drive image using Acronis TrueImage home 2010. But then, I always do this before a patch Tuesday, and never had this problem before. Wait, what was different this time? Well previously I saved the image to an old IDE drive, but lately, that drive had become unreliable and I think it was responsible for occasional blue screen F4 errors, so I had scrapped it.
Hence the drive image was written to my add-on USB hard drive instead. Now the solution hove into view. I rebooted again, going into the bios, and LO AND BEHOLD, Acroinis appears to have taken into it's head that the USB drive should now be promoted to the top of the boot order !!! WTF !!! Changed the boot order to what it should be, and everything is fine again.
I am now doubly doubtful of Acronis, who's 2010 version seems grossly inferior in every way to the previous version 9 I knew and loved. Shades of Norton......
