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Solve : XP Repair/Reinstall? |
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Answer» Win XP Home. Full version cd. 256mb ram. 20g hdd. Proc unknown. Today I will transfer the "bad" hdd to a known good system & try booting from it just to eliminate the possibility of a mobo error. It may have difficulty booting just because it is hooked to COMPONENETS that were not there when installed on that hard drive. Results could be inconclusive.Disconnect all peripherals and see if it will boot then. It might be stuck on a corrupt driver. Burn a KNOPPIX CD on a friend's computer and boot directly to it to see if your volumes are mountable. Use a floppy with just ntldr, ntdetect.com and your version of boot.ini to boot to the hardrive.Hello Virginia, is this the friend's computer? Do you know if a lot of files may have been copied directly to the root directory C: ? This can cause the ntldr, ntdetec.com files to be in the wrong place. Also have you tried running the drive manufacturer's diagnostic diskette over the drive, or have you tried loading the Recovery Console?Thanks guys. I tried the hdd swap around and couldn't boot from the suspect hdd in a known good system. A known good hdd with XP pre-installed booted successfully in the suspect system after loading new drivers etc. Slaved the hdd in a known good system and it was recognised in bios but I couldn't access any files. Mac, YES the problem is in a friend's pc - further interrogation reveals she can only confirm the following: An attempt to install AdAware failed (I think she aborted it). On next bootup she "seems to remember something about hal" but she's not sure what the message was, I presume hal.dll was missing. Have tried disconnecting peripherals, no change. Will d/l Knoppix and hdd diagnostic disk. Recovery console here I come.... Find it hard to believe that something as simple as a failed software install could cause so much angst. I thought NTFS was a most stable file system until now.... Thanks again to all...Hello again guys. I went into the Recovery Console witht the following results. DIR C: returned "Error While Enumerating Files" (Don't yet know what that means) DIR D: returned a list of the cd. DIR A: returned different results every time it was run but did return the cd disk Serial Number. (No explanation for that) CD and CHDIR returned "Invalid Path C:\Windows" and any other path I tried. Also found Master Boot Record and Master File Table corrupt. Ran Fixmbr which seemed to work but still couldn't boot from the hdd. Interesting that an attempt to boot into Safe Mode produced the usual list of files to be run but went no further. Anyway, I thought you'd tried to help enough, and I'd had enough, so Formatted and re-installed XP, just got the problem of Desktop screen resolution being set at the minimum and can't get the slide to move (Integrated Graphics of course). Still no idea of what could have caused this meltdown. Partitioning would have helped if all data was on D: but at least determined it wasn't an expensive hardware problem.... Thanks again to all. V...Life sure ain't simple. Having done all the necessaries like format, re-install OS, install SP.2, firewall, anti-virus and update the lot on-line I switched off for a while. On boot up got the missing hal.dll error message & when tried to correct that the lot turned to custard again. All of the faults in my first post reappeared so I guess the hdd really is shot!!! A trip to the hardware suppliers is indicated. Just thought you'd like to know the final outcome, and hey, I'm not the blonde in the family. Thanks one & all V... |
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