no boot from cd ...black screen

[AVRay]

My computer will not boot from xp cd.
It works in other pc's
vista cd boots fine.
PC work fine and boots normal

[Bob_180_Bob]

Hi,
What happens when you try to boot from XP CD, will the PC hang or go to the Hard drive and try and boot from there?...

[AVRay]

Hey Bob

Really strange problem.
When booting from CD it displays "setup is examin....." very briefly
then no activity Black screen
What makes it strange is that the PC boots normally from c drive
I loaded Repair console from MS website and tried fixboot, fixmbr, chkdsk reports no errors.
BTW its a dual boot and the second partition fails to boot with black screen

[Bob_180_Bob]

Hi,
If you have the space and time , it would be interesting to see what would happen if you copied your XP OS to your HD and then tried to install from there. This will also check your CD as you copy it for a bad read. If your CD is old and your CD player is old, that could be the problem. A new Vista CD works OK, Cd works ok in another PC, maybe a newer Cd player? Just a thought...

[AVRay]

Bob

CD player is fine so is disc.
The issue is really getting the second boot partition to work.
If I boot xp from HD and do an "upgrade" will it see my second partition and allow me to upgrade or repair that installation of windows.
I'm pretty sure you can only do that when booting from CD
I really dont want to trash primary XP as I have a ton of software on it.
Everything is backed up but I would like to avoid the three day ordeal of that.

[Bob_180_Bob]

Hi,
You can try to do a windows repair from a running windows, I am not sure if it will allow you to, but if you get to the area where it should highlight your OS and ask if you want to repair OK, if not you can just press F3 and exit the installation. I have never tried to do a repair from a running windows so I just do not know if you can.

The other option is to create a boot disk, go to
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html
Download and make a disk and fix your problem with it.