Another Sata HD problem

[nichos]

Hi,
On a not well known 5year old SATA "Excel Store" HD with XP, suddenly IE would start to freeze the PC. Sometimes waiting a few mnts would unfreeze & gradually the PC was alsmost unusable.

I thought perhaps a virus affected IE & decided to install Ubuntu 8.10 but since the PC would not boot & giving "NTLRD missing".

I found here Simple "ntldr is missing" fix with boot floppy, CD-R, or USB flash the "fixntldr.exe", created the floppy managed to get into safe mode & extracted NTLRD from the XP CD to Win. system32.

Then I got "hal.dll is missing" but now am unable to get in safe Mode nor in a dos prompt to extract hal.dll to System32, making that HD unusable.

I tried various CDs like UBCD etc unsuccesfully.

My partitions & files are not corrupted as I saw them a couple of times when managed the Safe Mode.

Any help on how to reinstall hal.dll in System32 willbe appreciated. ....thanx ....nick

[mariasizer]

Follows these steps:-

1) Put your XP cd into the system
2)Boot the CD
3)Log into repair console
4) change directory to cd/dvd drive and go into the i386 folder
5) type 'expand -r HAL.DL_ C:\WINDOWS\system32'

Change "recovery" to "repair"

If this could not help you out then you need to format the system. Before format take the backup otherwise you can recover lost data from third party tool like Recuva, Stellar windows data recovery software and many more.

[nichos]

Unfortunately when I boot on the XP CD & it starts with "...inspecting the hardware...." it hangs & goes in a black screen.

[mariasizer]

As long as you can access your files, take the backup before it can be corrupted. If it fails reinstall the O/S and restore your data.

[nichos]

unfortunately again I canot access the data as it will not boot even in safe mode.

[JustNC]

If u want to take backup of your data then use mini xp which boots from cd & give you access to all your HDD. so u can easily move data. In Hiren's Boot CD Mini XP is included.