Scandisk - Black screen/Safe Mode hanging

[ConMac]

I have have been having issues with my dual boot (Win7 & XP SP3) SB ASUS P8P67 Deluxe build (system freezing, black screen on cold boot/failed OC, Win 7 restore points being deleted by XP) and I made the following adjustments: updated the BIOS to v.1305 and made the required registry adjustments in XP for the restore point issue (which worked).

Now when I try to do a scandisk in Win7, it hangs after the reboot and I get a black screen. Also, when I try to go into Safe Mode with a command prompt, I see that Windows is loading files, then it hangs with the files listed on the screen. At this point Win7 no longer boots, and when I used the Repair Disk (and the OS DVD) to get into the Repair Console, Win7 was not listed so I could not locate any of my restore points. I restored a recent system image, and it seems to working now, with the restore points there again.

One other note, I upgraded the BIOS before I read where I had to make that my current BIOS was in its "failsafe default settings." Is this going to be a problem going forward? I would greatly appreciate for any help!

[liljim]

As long as your memory and cpu clock speeds are ok, the fail safe bios setting is fine. Check cpu speed and make sure its right.

[ConMac]

Thanks. Any thoughts on my other issues?

[Gecko]

ConMac,

What is your dual-boot setup, is it one drive with two partitions, two separate drives or just one drive and one partition?

[ConMac]

Two drives, Win7 on one, and XP on the other. I've been told by another forum to mark the Win7 active in XP's Disk Mgmt, unplug the XP HD then set the Win7 as the first HD to boot in BIOS. Then to boot the Win7 using the install HD and run Startup Repair up to 3 times until Win7 boots on its own. Then to plug the XP HD back in and boot it using the ASUS F8 one-time boot menu key. Does that sound about right?