can't start windows

[THE_SAINT]

I have a IBM Thinkpad pentium III, was using windows 2k. Recently upgraded to Windows XP. While start up process a screen use to be displayed with the options 'windows Xp professional and below that 'Microsoft windows'.Windows XP was always highlighted. And on the right hand side of the screen the seconds would count down. Below some text was written to the likes of the selected programme will start in 22 seconds et....
Also an option to select the other programme using the arrow keys and pressing enter. If I always hit enter key and Windows Xp would start up. One fine day i thought of selecting 'Microsoft Windows' and see what happens.

The screen went blank lot of command lines came up on the screen and the blank again and then it displayed a message say can't start windows <windows root>system32.hal.dll file is corrupt or missing. Please install file again. there after that is all it displays each time we try to start the computer.
have booted the computer with a bootable disk made on another desktop and all data is seen on the hard drive. Tried inserting a XP disk to repair or re-install the file to no avail. Also it does not read the cd drive. Tried re-formating the hard drive so may be load XP again. Does'nt allow us to do that.
Any Solutions will be much appreciated. Please Please.

[Raptor]

Press F8 before loading Windows XP and select the original installation you wish to boot from.

Did you overwrite a previous version of Windows when installing XP?

[GX1_Man]

It sounds like you loaded XP on top of 2000 (always a bad idea to do this) and you a) have a lot of non-functional items, and b) wasted a lot of hard drive space.
That is why you get the new message at boot between choosing between XP and whatever was on there previously.


When installing a new operating system you are always better off formatting the whoe drive and starting over. Some people get lucky and can "make it work" but it's not worth the aggravation.

[THE SAINT]

thanks for replying to my post, That would probably be the reason for this situation. Is there any solution to this or do i have to throw the laptop out?

[Raptor]

thanks for replying to my post, That would probably be the reason for this situation. Is there any solution to this or do i have to throw the laptop out?

Press F8 before loading Windows XP and select the original installation you wish to boot from.

Back-up data, reformat and reinstall.

[GX1_Man]

thanks for replying to my post, That would probably be the reason for this situation. Is there any solution to this or do i have to throw the laptop out?

Do you have operating system CD's or did it come only with the image on a hidden partition? Do you get a message to press F12 if you want to reinstall every time you boot?

[THE_SAINT]

no i do not get the prompt to press F12. Also can't reformat the drive, says bad command in DOS.

[GX1_Man]

Pick whichever operating system you want to use, make sure in the BIOS youcan boot from CDROM (F1 when you boot), then reload that Windows, butmake SURE you format the drive with either FAT32 (my preference) or NTFS (will slow things down a bit).

[Mac]

I just need to know if you partitioned the drive and installed 2000 on one partition and XP Professional on another, or have you done as stated and upgrade 2000 to XP?

You should have edited the boot.ini file in this case to remove the reference to Windows 2000.

It could be that the ntldr,ntdetect.com or boot.ini files are corrupt.

If you put the XP CD into the CD-ROM drive it should boot. (?)

If you have a floppy with the ntldr, ntdetect.com and boot.ini files on it it should also boot.

If you can run a KNOPPIX CD from the CD-ROM drive together with this boot re-director bootdisk BIOS BOOTDISK it will boot Knoppix without altering the BIOS boot sequence. If Knoppix can read the drive you can save any data by using the K3B burning program which comes with the Knoppix CD.

If you decide to re-install with an XP SP2 CD then you might have a problem deleting old NTFS partitions so you may need to use this DELPART BOOTDISK

There is also the BOOTINIEDIT bootdisk which will allow you to edit the boot.ini file on NTFS volumes.

It looks as if you'll need a boot.ini file that reads as follows...

[boot loader]
timeout=10
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

Alternatively, have you tried booting to the Recovery Console and typing - fixboot - or - fixmbr?

Take a look at - bootcfg /rebuild - and if you type - help -  at the prompt you'll see a list of the commands available for use with the Recovery Console.

[GX1_Man]

Mac,

I am so glad to see you promoting the Knoppix CD. Quite a handy tool, isn't it?

[Raptor]

no i do not get the prompt to press F12. Also can't reformat the drive, says bad command in DOS.

No such thing as DOS in XP.

Use XP CD-ROM

[merlin_2]

Is this a seagate drive>http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/drivers/discwiz.html

[GX1_Man]

probably Hitachi