XP stalling during a repair setup

So I installed Vista on my 2nd HD and it screwed up my MBR for my main XP drive. When I went to select the XP partition on the boot screen, it gave errors basically saying it wasn't set up right. All the files are still there.

I went to put in the XP CD and run FIXMBR from the console but this didn't fix my issues. So I did a repair on the XP partition which basically copies system files over, reboots and does a reinstall.

Once it reboots and starts to do a windows reinstall, it gets 70% through the install and then stalls. I've left it here for an hour or two and it doesn't move... rebooted a few times and it always gets to the same point.

Does anybody know how to skip past the install (I don't need it, it fixed the MBR since i'm booting into windows now...)?

Thanks.

FixBoot may have solved you problem. Or broken vista.

i don't know if u can do this but you could try and press F8 before it boots setup? boot in safe mode.


does it say what its copying? or what hardware its setting up when it hangs? I'm not sure you can bypass the last step of a reinstall without starting afresh.
you could try a reinstall/repair install again with more minimal hardware. There are no damaged sections of the cd? (if cleaning it wipe out not round)
you could also try and do a test with the tools on the ultimate boot cd if a reinstall with minimal hardware does not fix it

I've had a few times where I tried a repair. Gets so far and just stalls or hangs sitting at a certain percentage done. In these cases what I did was just run a fresh install from another folder (windows2). Then once in backed up my data then reformat the partition and reinstall windows.

I fixed this today by completely disconnecting the vista drive and booting into the setup again.

A good warning that trying to dual boot vista and XP may screw stuff up (I've never had this issue w/ any of the linux distros I've installed on other drives). I think vista has a new boot method and I assume that's causing the XP FIXMBR program to get confused.

Maybe you would need to install Vista then XP to get it to work correctly.

Can you still boot to Vista?
If so ( and if not this won't help the OP much but may benefit others) DL and install Vistaboot Pro.
This free little app not only allows you to edit the Vista bootloader but more applicable here, allows you to remove the bootloader altogether.
This will restore the functionality of XP's NTLDR and allow you to boot normally.

Just reformat when it's that bad. Sounds like you're gonna be required to reformat. In fact, it may continue to misbehave until you do a low level format.