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 http://tinyempire.com/notes/ntldrismissing.htm 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

 

[Wamphryi]

Perhaps the best way to take care of this would be to attach the drive to another PC preferrably externally. Scan the drive for errors and malware and if all is good copy hal.dll into the system32 folder and replace what is in there. If it still does not want to boot after that back up your data and do a fresh install. XP breaks over time and often needs reinstalling.

 

[nichos]

Thanx,

Sorry forgot to mention this vital thing, I tried similar but the faulty HD does not show up in Bios or Win.Explorer. .....nick

 

[nichos]

A correction here,

To recheck, I installed the faulty Sata on another PC with a Pata HD, & the faulty Sata showed up in Bios but not in win Explorer. .......nick