What ho one and all,

I am posting on my wife's computer because I have gotten myself (more specifically, my computer) into a bit of a pickle. To give some back-story.

Running XP; around Nov 2017, I made an Acronis True Image of C: to a second hdd. Verifyed it and all was well.

During Christmas, I upgraded all the hdd (three of them), and using that image, restored it to the larger (new) C: partition. Set everythiug up as I like it and all have been running sweetly for the past month. I also made a second (newer) image of the new C:

Because I receive wacky Firefox up-grade message on some sites that I visit, were the video was not playing, last night, I upgrade FF from 38.5 ESR to 52 ESR. It is almost OK, but I found that two of amy most used add-ons do not work; RoboForm and Evernote Clearly. This pisses me off, particularly RoboForm.

In the past, if I have unidstalled FF, reinstalled and copied my profile, it has not worked, so not wanting that hassel this time, I used the most recent image to restore C: and verify.

All is good until I reboot and I get past the Welcome screen but the next one (Windows) just freezes. I tried restoing the earlier image and the same. I have put the image onto one of the older (empty) hdd and the same. Just freezing on the windows screen.

So I figure, try the original XP disk and use Recovery Console / fixmbr. That would be fine, but I never get to Set Up; it just goes into the installatiom and installs XP from new.

So I don't know where to go next. May be the mbr is damaged but that has been imaged when I made the image? But I have had one month of no problems.

When I have run ATI form the CD to restore, I do get a message 'Failed to read sector **** on disk 4.' But I have no disk 4 installed?

The other message I have received when the screen freezes on the Win screen says 'The system has reached max size allowed for the system mpart of the registry. Additional storage requests will be ignored.'

What does that mean? I have never seen it before.

There is nothing wrong with the hdd as it has just finished reinstalling XP and looks fine. I am sure there is nothing wrong with either image, it just will not boot past the Win screen.

Thanks and toodle pip

Rex

Grateful for any suggestions as I don't know what to do next.