Booting Windows on MB Pro: blank screen

Hi lads

I have a major problem ... this morning when I turned on my lovely MacBook Pro, I found to my horror that Windows wouldn't boot. The screen flashed grey and made a beep, but after that, just blank ...

I then held Option while booting, selected Windows, and managed to boot fine. I thought all was ok, and went to work, but now I see that I can't even do that trick anymore!!! No matter what I try, Windows won't boot.

I REALLY need some help with this, as all my stuff is on the Win partition ...

If you know whats going on, or know of some threads that may help (searched already) I would be VERY gratefull!

MacOs is running fine, by the way ...

Specs: 15" MB Pro, 2,6ghz, 4gb ram

THANKS in advance!!

/Thomas

It would help if you could let us know which version of Windows you're running along with OS X? It makes a difference to what method of repair we suggest.

Repair XP

Repair Vista

Repair Windows 7

Take your choice.

Regards.

Ah, sorry, I'm running Win XP SP2 and OS X 10.5.5 (model MacBookPro5,1)

As a side note, I was actually going to install Windows 7, so I don't necessarily need XP up and running again, allthough it would be great, to perform a backup of my data.

What I really want to know is if this is a hardware thing, like HDD (no odd sounds or other problems) or perhaps the 9600M graphics card, that XP uses default, or if it's just the Windows installation that's shot.

Since the screen just goes blank, I can't tell ... Is there any way to debug what happens at boot?

Thanks chscag!

/T

Hi:

Well, no real way to debug what happens when it won't boot but there is something you can try:

Since it's XP, it will be a bit easier - See if you can get it to boot to SAFE mode by holding down the F8 key during boot up. Try doing this:

1. Restart your system
2. When the system first boots, tap F8 to bring up the boot menu
3. Select the Safe Mode with Command Prompt option
4. Log-on as administrator if needed
5. At the command prompt type %systemroot%\system32\restore\rstrui.exe
6. Hit Enter
(This will open the system restore wizard…)

If you can get to system restore, try going back to an earlier time when things were working OK.

If that doesn't work or it won't boot to SAFE mode, try the repair install that I provided a link to in my previous reply.

Regards.

Thanks, chscag!! I'll give it a try tonight. Fingers crossed, but I turned off System Restore a long time ago, but the important thing is that I know it's not hardware, so I can reinstall Windows (7)

/Thomas

if you still can't get windows to boot. you can copy the files off the windows drive in macosx that you'd like to backup then use boot camp manager to remove the partition and start from scratch.