XP cd will not boot? Trying to get rid of Vista

[tjep]

Here is the deal. I have a media center running Vista Premium box - however, my system gets beaten by Vista so I have decided to revert to XP - and I am thinking "that's easy"... guess not... what I do is this:

I make sure that my DVD drive is primary boot device, and insert my bootable XP cd - when the "Press any key to boot from cd" appears, I press any key - and it seems that the system acknowledges and I can hear the cd spinning in the drive - however at some point it stops... and I am left with a blank black screen with a white cursor blinking in the top left corner.

I have tried two different xp cds, but the same result - if I insert my Vista cd, I can get through the boot sequence without problems - so the dvd drive is working ok.

Could there be a problem with the MBR? I have run the bootexc.exe from Vista to try and fix any errors - but that has not helped... I am stuck, I guess... any hints?

 

[pcaceit]

Could still be a faulty cd/dvd drive, poorly connected ide cables, faulty ide controller, or you have another faulty ata device connected on one of the ide cables; Even if the drive reads dvd's ok it can still be faulty and not read some cd's correctly.

try another cd/dvd drive. then post results

 

[tjep]

Does it not sound strange...

that I can boot without a glitch into Vista bootup sequence but not into xp? Do not see how the drive could be "XP" faulty?

 

[pcaceit]

Not strange at all! I have worked with faulty drives that will read some disks and not others.

Its to do with the cd/dvd drive being out of calibration, faulting electronic components, worn mechanical parts, even the software used to burn discs might not be compatible with some drives.

If you are sure that your cd drive is ok then maybe your disk is damaged. (try to boot it on another machine)

you should try to eliminate whether you have damaged xp disk, or faulty cd/dvd before exploring the other possible causes that i mentioned.

 

[pcaceit]

Have you tried using hdd tune to check for damaged sectors on the disk you are trying to install on?

Seems you can access it from vista and what is this (bootexc.exe ) that you run from vista? (is it a virus???) could it be a vairant of this??: http://www.2-spyware.com/remove-donalddick-trojan.html

are you installing on a different Hdd or another partition?

 

[flameup]

There are several data recovery related forums and blogs exist. I think that you should do some search there as well

 

[tjep]

...what is this (bootexc.exe ) that you run from vista?

My bad... it is called Bootrec.exe and I use it from the recovery console after having booted the Vista dvd.... however, I just realized that I could try and do a FixBoot and then a FixMbr on Vista - if this fails I will try and do a check with HD Tune...

Thanks so far!!

 

[pcaceit]

You just told me something! I have never tried to run those from vista recovery in command prompt:

Just suggested it because xp might just not be able to access the disk due to corruption.

I am guessing that you are doing a clean install! So if thats the case You will want to delete then Recreate, and format the partition(s) Using the vista boot disk. This eliminates the possibility that it's a Hdd access problem. Then if xp still fails then you definately will have to try a different cd/dvd or try an external one:

 

[tjep]

Thanks for your feedback - all. I will give this a try over the weekend and will update the thread...