Advice required to resolve xp start up issue.

I have a PC I use only to run CNC hardware on an old fujitsu pc. It has a dual Linux and Windows XP boot. I just choose at startup which I want to use. Recently the hard drive has not wanted to start XP. The Linux OS opens fine.

I would select XP as the start up option, it would then go to the startup prompt screen (safe mode, start up normally etc). When I pressed start up normally it would cycle back round to the OS options and so on.

I removed the drive and installed it in a caddy. I can see all of the file structures for both OS so I presume the hard drive is not the issue. I ran 'check the drive for errors'. The error check spotted a couple of issues and told me it had resolved these so I removed the drive put it back into the fujitsu pc it had come from and XP started and worked fine. However when I restarted to check it again it would not get further that the start up prompt screen.I should also add that I tried the drive out in a different Acer pc which may have confused a startup proceedure.

My question is how do I get XP to start reliably again. That PC has largely worked really well considering the amount of work its done running various CNC machines over the last few years. What I would like would be to run something which would resolve the issue without me having to install a new copy of XP and all the software ect.

Today I backed up my documents and made a system restore disk but as a long term mac user i'm not familiar with the restore or repair proceedures of windows.

Any advice or links i'm all ears, thanks.

 

my first thing would be to run checkdisk, but you say you have done that, (should be run as many times as needed till no errors are found and with the /r parameter).

then I would run the recovery console and run fixboot and fixmbr, but since you have a dual boot and linux uses grub, I am not sure how to do this.

make sure that you have xp to not automatically restart after a failure, go to start/right click on my computer and choose properties/ advanced tab/ startup and recoveries/ make sure that automatic restart is unchecked.

are there any errors pertaining to this issue in event viewer? it would help to see if a driver is holding up the completion of the load.