Hello Everyone. First time poster. Here it goes.
I have a Dell Latitude L400 laptop that I purchased used. It had windows 2000 initially on it and I installed windows xp sp1 over the top. Now I get the message: "Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt. <Windows root>\system32\hal.dll. Please re-install a copy of the above file."
Fine. No problem. I have the xp setup disks right here. Wrong. My used Dell laptop only has external floppy and cd rom drives that I purchased separately. The two drives use 1 USB port. But when I hook either the cdrom or the floppy disk up to the USB port, nothing is recongized and nothing even registers with a nice light blinking. Hmmmm. So here are my questions in no particular order: Oh yeah, by the way...safe mode and all other modes (debugging, and last good configuration) when you press F8 is the same outcome.
1. How do I get to a command prompt without using the cdrom or floppy disk drive?
2. How do I access the USB port with out access to the hard drive at all?
3. Can I do a network boot from my desktop PC, and how would I configure it since this laptop is not responding in any way?
I hope someone out there is able to help, and I really do appreicate it!