Dual Boot Working / Adding Virtualisation Caused Problem

[SrLANGuy]

I already had dual boot working perfectly! WinXP is on the 1st hard drive and Mac OS X on the 2nd hard drive.

 

In Mac OS X, I went and installed VMWare Fusion. When I launched it for the first time, it saw my Windows XP drive and thought it had been setup by Boot Camp. Well, I think it changed something on that drive.

 

When I restart my computer and choose Windows XP (instead of OS X), it shows the Windows splash screen with the black background, but when that disappears after 15-20 seconds, I get a black screen and that's it. I have to hold the power button in to shut off the computer.

 

If I boot into Safe Mode, it works. I've run MSCONFIG and told it not to load anything at startup, but when I restart Windows XP, it still hangs at the same spot (right about the time you would start to see your desktop wallpaper.

 

Any idea what VMWare might have done to my Windows XP hard drive?

 

Any ideas on how to get my Windows XP booting normally again?

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[SrLANGuy]

I RESOLVED MY PROBLEM!

 

After booting into Safe Mode, I ran "HijackThis.exe" and scanned to see what was trying to run at startup. I found and removed the following VMware entry:

 

O4 - HKLM\..\RunOnce: [ToolsInstall] %windir%\temp\VMwareToolsUpgrader.exe -p "/s /v\"/qr REBOOT=FORCE\""

 

After removing that, Windows XP started booting again without any problems.

 

Hopefully, this will help someone else when they run into this problem.